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"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."
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"Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig."

"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."

"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."

"Reading books exposes us to the consistency and uniqueness of being human. Book reading is an investigatory process. We read books in order to encounter the orchestrated words that describe emotions and observations that we too have experienced but are unable to glean the right alignment of words that fully embody the resonance that we seek."

"Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively

"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."

"The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction."

"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."

"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."

"The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss."

"I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement."
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