Quotes from Penelope Lively

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

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

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

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

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've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

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

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.

A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery

Behind and byond her looks,her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it, back then, he thought. All you saw was her face.

How many men have asked you to marry them?' 'Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.

Far as I'm concerned, they're all still here, like a lot of dear little ghosts.

When I look at those years I look at them alone. What happened there happens now only inside my head - no one else sees the same landscape, hears the same sounds, knows the sequence of events. There is another voice, but it is one that only I hear. Mine - ours - is the only evidence.

I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been time for…

I can admire, but I no longer covet. Books of course are another matter; books are not acquisitions, they are necessities.

We all act as hinges - fortuitous links between other people.

She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem. (...) She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.

like most people, they know one another inside out, and not at all.

In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.