"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."

Want, Writers

19

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"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."

Exlpore more Want quotes

"If you want to be happy, be."

Leo Tolstoy, Russian Novelist

Want,

"When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that."

Gertrude Stein, American Author

Want,

"If you want to be loved, be lovable."

Ovid, Roman Poet

Want,

"The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have."

Erich Fromm, American Psychologist

Want,

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."

Kurt Vonnegut, American Author

Want,

"Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know."

Eric Hoffer, American Writer

Want,

"I do want to go another way - to write something completely different."

Anne Rice, American Novelist

Want,

"What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."

Confucius, Chinese Philosopher

Want,

"Don't say "the White House wants." Buildings can't want."

Donald Rumsfeld, American Politician

Want,

"I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me."

Doug Coupland, Canadian Author

Want,

Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively

"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

"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."

Reading

"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."

Past

"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."

Family

"It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency."

Choice

"Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going."

Art

"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."

Change

"I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children."

Thought

"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."

Fiction

"I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements."

Want