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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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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Present
Medium
Happens
Mediums
Past
Central
Even
Hardly
Time
Exists
Concern
Fiction
Tricky
Becomes
Concerns

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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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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'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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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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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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Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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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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The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
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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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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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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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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
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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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If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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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