Quotes By Penelope Lively

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.