Penelope Lively Quotes
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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.
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
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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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Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
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We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
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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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I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
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Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
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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.
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I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.
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All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.
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We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.
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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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I rather like getting away from fiction.
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It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.
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I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
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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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I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
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Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
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I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
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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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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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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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You learn a lot, writing fiction.