Penelope Lively

“I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't…

— Penelope Lively

“The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting…

— Penelope Lively

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

— Penelope Lively

“He felt marvellously conscious of the moment, of here and now, of this day.”

— Penelope Lively

People die, but money never does.

— Penelope Lively

“But her thoughts are often of the past. That evanescent, pervasive, slippery internal landscape known to no one else, that vast accretion…

— Penelope Lively

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

— Penelope Lively

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

— Penelope Lively

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman…

— Penelope Lively

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom…

— Penelope Lively

“I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village…

— Penelope Lively

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

— Penelope Lively

“The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.”

— Penelope Lively

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

— Penelope Lively

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the…

— Penelope Lively

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

— Penelope Lively

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

— Penelope Lively

In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it…

— Penelope Lively

“My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined.”

— Penelope Lively

“She read to find out what it was like to be French or Russian in the nineteenth century, to be a rich…

— Penelope Lively

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's…

— Penelope Lively

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

— Penelope Lively

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single…

— Penelope Lively

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at…

— Penelope Lively

“Children are not like us. They are beings apart: impenetrable, unapproachable. They inhabit not our world but a world we have lost…

— Penelope Lively