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

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.
Penelope Lively

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.
Penelope Lively

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

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

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.
Penelope Lively

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.
Penelope Lively

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

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively