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

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
Write
Didn
Anything
Wells
Well
Writing

More quotes by Penelope Lively

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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.
Penelope Lively
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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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People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
Penelope Lively
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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.
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.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
Penelope Lively
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
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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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If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
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I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively