Quotes Penelope Lively

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intens...

And there was Alice in Wonderland. I was a child who was abs...

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points o...

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should...

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless re...

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

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where ...

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an abso...

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thoug...

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

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

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

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few yea...

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when y...

I married young and had children young....

I rather like getting away from fiction....

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can of...

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how ...

I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively ...

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

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do af...

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the...

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disco...

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's li...

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I su...