Top 32 Quotes by Penelope Lively

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

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

You learn a lot, writing 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.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

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

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.