Penelope Lively Quotes

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I'm not a 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.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

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.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

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

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

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

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

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

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

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

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

In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.

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

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.

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

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.

All history, of course, is the history of wars.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

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

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.

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

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

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

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

People die, but money never does.

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

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

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

I rather like getting away from fiction.

Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.

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.

the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

Charlotte views her younger selves with a certain detachment. They are herself, but other incarnations, innocents going about half-forgotten business.

So now we are young still but a better sort of young.