Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.
- Penelope Lively Quote

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

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
- Penelope Lively Quote

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.
- Penelope Lively Quote

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

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
- Penelope Lively Quote

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
- Penelope Lively Quote

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.
- Penelope Lively Quote

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
- Penelope Lively Quote

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.
- Penelope Lively Quote

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.
- Penelope Lively Quote

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

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.
- Penelope Lively Quote

Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
- Penelope Lively Quote
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.
- Penelope Lively Quote

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
- Penelope Lively Quote

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.
- Penelope Lively Quote