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

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
Present
Suit
History
Collective
Past
Frequently
Require
Equally
Reinterpretation
Suits
Perceptions
Endless
Hence
Perception
Collectives

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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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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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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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
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There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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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.
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
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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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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
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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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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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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
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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.
Penelope Lively
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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively