Penelope Lively Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
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People sometimes recognize me here, but they are very nice.
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While teaching, I also worked undercover in the lower courts by saying I was a young law teacher wanting experience in criminal law. The judges were happy to assist me but what I learned was how corrupt the lower courts were. Judges were accepting money right in the courtroom.
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Wit as an instrument of revenge is as infamous as art is as a means of sensual titillation.
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I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food.
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I don't want to paint a picture of total gloom and doom.
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With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.
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That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.
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If you are in a relationship, it has to be a good one. If it isn't, it's best to just leave it.
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My dad's family were pretty working class, actually.
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I love researching, I love interviewing.
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I had a lot of alone time with no brothers or sisters running around, or anything. I would just sit and imagine things, all the time.
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Laughter is regional: a smile extends over the whole face.
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I had a ball doing Harry Potter.
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We get a lot of emails, a lot of suggestions on the kinds of ideas and things that people would like to do. There's a lot of good ones, but a lot of them are something that the franchise couldn't or wouldn't endorse, just as being not consistent with what the NBA would want or, probably, what we would even want, too.
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Isn't it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?
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I didn't act in school. I didn't study acting, either. I learned everything when I got to New York.
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People want a grounded government. They want a government that's going to be responsible to them.
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I've written in every imaginable location; a repurposed closet, the kitchen table, the bleachers while my kids had basketball practice, the front seat of the car when they were at soccer. In airports. On trains. In the break room when I was supposed to be wolfing down dinner. In the back of classrooms when I was supposed to be paying attention.
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My husband and I are just really laid back people.
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Every time I started going in the direction of thinking how it might turn out, I started to just turn my brain around and not go there, because I think the surest way to guarantee that you won't win is to assume that you will.
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I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
