Quotes from Penelope Lively

But the point was to be carefree, independent. Artists can't be hampered by the dailiness of ordinary life--Tony felt strongly about that. Doing the same things every day, forever bothered about money. Art has to be freed from all that.

When you prefer soup and the telly to a few hours with your lover there is something not quite right.

Moments shower away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders and fought by boys.

Jane--it's history, all this. I say that I have always thought history to be of great relevance.

And yet I am by nature sceptical - a questioner, a doubter, an instinctive agnostic.

Reading in old age for me is doing what it has always done--it frees me from the closet of my own mind.

You need a certain mentality to cope with children. I don't have it. Thank God.

When I was her age, thought Pauline, the options were confusing. They always are. Who'd be young? Everything wide open, which means that the not chosen is discarded. Junked.

Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

This is the satisfaction of a successful work of fiction--the internal coherence that reality does not have. Life as lived is disordered, undirected, and at the mercy of contingent events.

And in any case, I am someone else now. This seems to contradict earlier assertions that you are in old age the person you always were. What I mean is that old age has different needs, different satisfactions, a different outlook. I remember my young self, and I am not essentially changed, but I perform otherwise today. There are things I no longer want, things I no longer do, things that are now important.

When a thing's happened to you it's no good shoving it away and pretending it hasn't. You can go off your head that way.' 'Battles?' 'Not just battles,' said Bill with a snort. 'Most of us don't get mixed up with battles, do we? Anything. Everything.' Everything? 'It's what you do about things that makes you the kind of bloke you are,' said Bill.

I've been like someone with a bad cold, all kind of shut up inside myself, not being able to hear other people. Just shouting out at them sometimes.

What she was retreating from was any profundity of feeling and therefore any commitment more intense than light church attendance and an interest in roses.... History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out.

The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.

Helen,' said Mr Harrison, with a sigh, 'we all know that living with James can be very trying. But it does help to develop a resistance to some of his more flagrant lines of deception.

I'm afraid I can't do the things you want me to do because people don't go in much for sorcery nowadays. I don't think they'd be very interested.

Life must go on, no matter how large your problems may be.

Ghosts?' Said Mrs Verity. 'Why, good gracious, I could tel you a thing or two about ghosts. Believe in them? Well, what I always say is, we don't know the answers to everything, do we? I mean, there's some things in this world you can't explain and maybe we're not meant to.

Still, if that's the way she feels about it there's not much use you going home now and saying "Look mum, I got a bloke coming in tomorrow to see about the ghost", is there?

My body has conditioned things, to some extent. The life of an attractive woman is different from that of a plain one. My hair, my eyes, the shape of my mouth, the contours of breast and thigh have all contributed.

God, she says, 'is an unprincipled bastard, wouldn't you agree?

James would have liked to contribute comfort of some kind, but he only had a gob-stopper in his pocket, coated with fluff, which seemed an inadequate offering.