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
Penelope Lively quotes about
lying nerd library
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
latin museums lexicon
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.
aspect english-author historian whether
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.
Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.
past fiction tricky
The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.
past perception suits
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
book want made
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.