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
"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."
"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."
"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."
"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."
"Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away."
"Are you naked?" he rasped out. Swallowing hard, she nodded."
"Oh my God, you're such a guy!" "I'm glad you noticed." The glint in his dark eyes was purely wicked."
"Caleb shifted uncomfortably as he closed the door behind him. For a moment, he'd thought she'd been naked under the sheet. But, it had been a nude-colored type of top. Didn't seem to matter, the sight had kicked his fantasies into overdrive. She tried to hide herself, but the nightlight next to her bed cast a soft amber glow around her shining right through the thin sheet, illuminating her small pert breasts perfectly even through the top. He couldn't live under the same roof as her and not go insane. He would make an announcement tomorrow. She was off-limits."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively
"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 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 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."
"It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency."
"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 didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children."
"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