top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Fiction quotes
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
"One thing I've learned about vampires--they keep pulling new rabbits out of their cloaks. Big, fanged, carnivorous bunnies that'll eat your eyeballs if you're not paying attention."
"What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up-Ho-HO! Now you've got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You're not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I'm talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it."
"We'd read about sirens in English this fall; Greek mythology bullshit about women so beautiful, their voices so enchanting, that men did anything for them. Turned out that mythology crap was real because every time I saw her, I lost my mind."
"Guess we're going north," Dev said slowly."Everyone, follow Lassie.Timmy's in the well."
"I write fiction""What's fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life."
"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."
"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.."
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 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."
"It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page