Penelope Lively Book Quotations

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.