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.
From Penelope Lively
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
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.
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.
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
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.
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives