Penelope Lively Quotes

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

I started writing stories as a child.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.

Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

I've never abandoned the novel.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.