Penelope Lively

Author

1933-03-17

Quotes by Penelope Lively

• Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

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• It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

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• Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

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• It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• All history, of course, is the history of wars.

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