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.
Penelope Lively
2
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.
Penelope Lively
3
Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
Penelope Lively
4
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively
5
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
6
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
7
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
Penelope Lively
8
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
9
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.
Penelope Lively
10
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.
Penelope Lively
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.
Penelope Lively
14
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.
Penelope Lively
15
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.
Penelope Lively
16
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively
17
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.
Penelope Lively
18
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
19
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively
20
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
21
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.
Penelope Lively
22
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
23
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
24
We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.
Penelope Lively
