Quote

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Penelope Lively

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Fiction
Learn
Writing

More quotes by Penelope Lively

Image
I rather like getting away from fiction.
Penelope Lively
Image
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.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
Image
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
Image
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
Penelope Lively
Image
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
Image
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively
Image
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
Penelope Lively
Image
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
Image
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.
Penelope Lively
Image
Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
Image
the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
Image
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
Image
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
Image
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