Quotes by Penelope Lively

About Penelope Lively:

Dame Penelope Margaret Lively is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. She has won both the Booker Prize (Moon Tiger, 1987) and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books (The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, 1973).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

So now we are young still but a better sort of young.

Penelope Lively

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

Penelope Lively

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales...from Ordo...

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 cont...

Penelope Lively

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.

Penelope Lively

I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.

Penelope Lively

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of who...

Penelope Lively

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...

Penelope Lively

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.

Penelope Lively

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

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

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

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

I rather like getting away from fiction.

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

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

Penelope Lively

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Penelope Lively

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

Penelope Lively

Author Bio

  • NamePenelope Lively
  • DescriptionBritish novelist
  • BornMarch 17, 1933
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Radio Host
  • AwardsCarnegie Medal; Dame Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire