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"Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going."
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"Movies can be instruments of enlightenment."

"The goal of art was the vital expression of self."

"The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art."

"Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late."

"When whisperedwhat an exquisitesong, it makes-your name."

"A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved."

"It would have to be connected with performance art somehow, either in the front of the house or the back. I was myopic about this from fourth grade on."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."
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