Literary Birthday – 17 March – Penelope Lively
Happy Birthday, Penelope Lively, born 17 March 1933.
Quotes
- You learn a lot, writing fiction.
- You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.
- 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.
- All history, of course, is the history of wars.
- 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.
- It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
- 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 favourites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved – probably too starved to go on writing myself.
- I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.
- An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time.
- I’ve always been fascinated by the operation of memory – the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
- Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
- History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.
- For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.
- 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 peoples of whom we have never heard.
Penelope Lively is a popular and critically acclaimed English author of fiction for children and adults. She won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger
and the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012.
Source for Image: Author’s website
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: Literary Birthday Calendar
Posted on: 17th March 2014
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1 thought on “Literary Birthday – 17 March – Penelope Lively”
Penelope has clearly never lived in deepest darkest Africa, where your nearest bookstore is a flight away, with a weight restriction of 15kg per person! I love my kindle – it has changed expat life!
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