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. – Penelope Lively
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
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard. – Penelope Lively
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency. – Penelope Lively
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
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
Equally, we require a collective past – hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present. – Penelope Lively
I didn’t think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children. – Penelope Lively
There’s a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history. – Penelope Lively
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss. – Penelope Lively
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are. – Penelope Lively
I’ve always been fascinated by the operation of memory – the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence. – Penelope Lively
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. – Penelope Lively
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
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
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. – Penelope Lively
I’m now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I’m eternally grateful for. – 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. – Penelope Lively
