Penelope Lively Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.”

“I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.”

“I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.”

“I rather like getting away from fiction.”

“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.”

“I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.”

“Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”