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
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.
book reading support-systems
Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.
science past aspect
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.
atoms world language
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.