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"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."
Past,
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"Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable."
Past,
"Much of my high-jinx have been drug-related. When you're under 30, whatever, but once you're past 40 it's just ugly."
"I found with this record I had to really be strong-willed, because in the past I've tended to tinker and add a thing or take a thing away, and nearly always been wrong."
Explore more quotes by Penelope Lively
"Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are."
"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."
"Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm."
"There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history."
"Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present."
"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."
"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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