Penelope Lively Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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After leaving school, I travelled around Europe for about six months. In Denmark, I thought that was my chance to get an amazing haircut, so I went to what I thought was a great hairdresser. It turned out to be the car wash of hairdressers, and I walked out sporting yet another pudding bowl, but this time with a stripe bleached down the centre.
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Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
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To be honest, I think that I am a bit of a singer, coming from Wales; being Welsh, we are all very proud of our singing heritage.
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I don't think I'm that intelligent. I think I'm semi-intelligent.
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I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.
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Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.
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It's very likely that I will finish my career as Swiss national coach.
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There comes a point in nearly every book event I've done when a little feminist revolt stirs inside the crowd.
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I don't like to post fresh standup material, because I want to use it in a special. The stuff I like to post online I like to be off-the-cuff moments.
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Anyone in the comedy world knows that Horatio Sanz and Chris Parnell are two of the funniest guys around.
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A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
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The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV. Because at least you know that there's some intelligence behind the cartoons, and there's a lot of work that's gone into it, so it can't all be just a lie.
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When I was releasing EPs by myself, I was generating royalties. And when I signed, I thought I'd put those royalties into other artists. And interestingly, streaming is most of the income for those artists.
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The thing I find really scary about ghosts and demons is that you don't really know what they are or where they are. They're not very well understood. You don't know what they want from you. So it's the kind of thing you don't even know how to defend yourself against. Anything that's unknown and mysterious is very scary.
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I am not interested in producing fiction for Indian television at all, the reason being that I don't understand the medium. I can be a judge or a host; I can do that as an individual. But to produce TV content, you have to know the game.
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If you're a psychologist, you can instrumentally change peoples lives for the better. But you can only do that for about 300 people to maybe a thousand people - if you're really prolific and you're working really hard.
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You can almost judge how screwed up somebody is by the kind of toilet paper they use. Go in any rich house and it's some weird coloured embossed stuff.
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My thinking has always been that the worst problem we have with regard to lack of inclusion is the terribly low labor force participation rates and terribly high unemployment rates of young men, especially young men in ethnic minority groups and, in particular, young black men.
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Yves Saint Laurent was the first person who made me feel like a woman.
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We all have them, those parts of us that are the greatest parts of us and the worst parts of us. Sometimes we're put in circumstances and bad choices are made.
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'Flaubert's Parrot' is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.
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You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.
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Never put off writing until you are better at it.
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
