Penelope Lively Quotes - Page 2

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

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.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

I'm not a 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.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

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

If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.

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

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived but it is still all going on, in the mind for better and for worse.

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 Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster.

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. 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.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

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

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

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

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

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

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

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