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You learn a lot, writing 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
Learn
Writing
Fiction

More quotes by 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 rather like getting away from 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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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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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.
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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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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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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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If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
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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Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
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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History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.
Penelope Lively
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It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
Penelope Lively
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People die, but money never does.
Penelope Lively
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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively