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All Penelope Lively Quotes
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.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
Penelope Lively
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We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
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We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
Penelope Lively
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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.
Penelope Lively
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Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
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