Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively
Dame Penelope Margaret Lively DBE FRSLis a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. She has won both the Booker Prizeand the Carnegie Medal for British children's books...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth17 March 1933
giving people way
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.
sweet self broken
The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.
choices happenstance
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
country home grandmother
I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
beautiful way appearance
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.
memories way linear
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
children thinking might
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
past identity needs
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
kings grateful agnostic
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
war history courses
All history, of course, is the history of wars.
writing character alternatives
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.
fiction get-away
I rather like getting away from fiction.
thinking mets ifs
If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.
reading writing names
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.