Penelope Lively Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
-
Maybe 10 times a year I'll do a corporate date, but no casinos or no nightclubs or no comedy clubs.
-
I feel optimistic about how heterogeneous societies pull together. We just have to keep on with the struggle.
-
I always appreciate people's opinions, but sometimes I have to take a step back and remember why I'm writing and what I want to do with it. Shutting out the voices is difficult but it's been good for me.
-
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
-
The things that have really gotten confusing to me is how you balance the desires of your publishers to produce things on a schedule, and people are always sort of giving you ideas on what you should follow up with or how you should proceed next and things like that.
-
What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
-
I can remember loving to recruit. I knew I was going to do my best. But traveling and recruiting doesn't appeal to me any more. It's not as much fun as it used to be.
-
I can't give more than I have. It doesn't matter if I am the most beautiful person in the room. There is inevitably going to be somebody way shinier and more tan than my pasty self.
-
I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.
-
My choosing Islam was not a political statement; it was a spiritual statement.
-
Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.
-
I remember feeling that Michael was extremely sensitive when it came to that moment. Most directors are and they usually rely, at least in my experience, on the actress to take over. And Michael is a gentleman.
-
My first film 'Saawariya' was a flop; I don't regret it.
-
Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
-
When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it's Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is.
-
I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.
-
Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can't often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.
-
I'm a very political person, and I think things through clearly, even when I was 18 years old.
-
My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.
-
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
-
The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness.
-
There is no fact-checking on tertiary celebrities. You can say whatever you'd like, and it will just rise up again.
-
Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses but not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.
-
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.
