Quotes from Penelope Lively

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

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

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

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

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

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'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.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

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.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

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.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

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.

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.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

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.

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

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.