Penelope Lively

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

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

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.

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

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

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.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

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

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

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.