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

Penelope Lively

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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Thinking
Gains
Loss
Century
Though
Rather
Social
Change
Consideration
Think
Gain

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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
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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.
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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.
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People die, but money never does.
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I rather like getting away from fiction.
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There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
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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.
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the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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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.
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I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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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.
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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.
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
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