194 Quotes by Penelope Lively

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.

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.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

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.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

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

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

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

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