Penelope Lively Quotes

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 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.

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales...from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster.

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

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.

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

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

I rather like getting away from fiction.

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

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.

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. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

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

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.

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

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

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.

But who knows their own child? You know bits - certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.

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

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

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

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.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

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.

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

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

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

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

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

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.

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

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

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

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

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.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.

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

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

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.