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All Penelope Lively Quotes
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
49% of people like this quote
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
49% of people like this quote
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
48% of people like this quote
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
48% of people like this quote
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
48% of people like this quote
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
48% of people like this quote
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
48% of people like this quote
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
47% of people like this quote
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
47% of people like this quote
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
46% of people like this quote
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
46% of people like this quote
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
Penelope Lively
46% of people like this quote
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively
45% of people like this quote
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