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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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Penelope Lively
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 17
Novelist
Radio Personality
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Penelope Low
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively
Days
Insubstantial
Lives
Vanish
Reality
Enduring
Seems
Utterly
Invented
Endure
Seem
Fiction
More quotes by Penelope Lively
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
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
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
Penelope Lively
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
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
I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.
Penelope Lively
History unravels circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.
Penelope Lively
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
If people don't read, that's their choice a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.
Penelope Lively
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
Penelope Lively
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
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
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
Penelope Lively
Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form logic a message.
Penelope Lively
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
