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"I rather like getting away from fiction."
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"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."
"Sometime later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to be have been trampled to death."
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
"Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away."
"Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to 'cleaning' as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings " and anyway, she didn't need to know her mark's entire pedigree or life's story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read " on those rare occasions " her books were always dog-eared from the back."
"Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively
"I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children."
"Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence."
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