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Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

Penelope Lively

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

Penelope Lively

Climate

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.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

Penelope Lively

Curiosity

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Penelope Lively

Fiction

Writing

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.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Penelope Lively

Choices

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.

Penelope Lively

Want

Writers

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

Penelope Lively

Bible

Mythology

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

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.

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.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

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

Penelope Lively

Change