P. D. James Quotes

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• I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

  P. D. James

  Thinking, Order, Wish

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• to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

  P. D. James

  Memories, Past, Looks

  P. D. James (2011). “Time to Be in Earnest”, p.15, Faber & Faber

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  It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

  P. D. James

  Life, Memories, Fall

  P. D. James (2008). “A Taste for Death”, p.339, Faber & Faber

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• Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

  P. D. James

  Writing, Thinking, Needs

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• I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

  P. D. James

  Skulls, Skins, Facts

  P.D. James (2012). “The Skull Beneath the Skin: A Cordelia Gray Mystery”, p.159, Simon and Schuster

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• When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

  P. D. James

  Wall, Fall, Sat

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• I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

  P. D. James

  War, Believe, Political

  FaceBook post by P.D. James from Oct 30, 2011

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• Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

  P. D. James

  Night, Two, Sailing

  P. D. James (2008). “The Lighthouse”, p.276, Faber & Faber

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• Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

  P. D. James

  Writing, Eye, Voice

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• A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

  P. D. James

  Believe, Politician, Humbug

  P. D. James (2010). “A Taste for Death”, p.42, Vintage

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• We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

  P. D. James

  Moments, Eternal Life, Eternal

  FaceBook post by P.D. James from Jan 20, 2015

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• Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

  P. D. James

  Rejection, Infanticide

  P. D. James (2008). “Original Sin”, p.89, Faber & Faber

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• Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

  P. D. James

  Past, Men, Beast

  FaceBook post by P.D. James from Jan 01, 2017

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• We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

  P. D. James

  Writing, World, Language

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• The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

  P. D. James

  Men, Self, World

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.154, Vintage

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• The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

  P. D. James

  Sex, Religion, Modern

  P. D. James (2003). “The murder room”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

  P. D. James

  Kindness, May, Firsts

  P. D. James (2011). “Devices and Desires”, p.416, Vintage

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• Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

  P. D. James

  Eye, Light, Mass Extinction

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.24, Vintage

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• Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

  P. D. James

  New Experiences, People, Mind

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• Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

  P. D. James

  Retirement, People, Unemployment

  P. D. James (2012). “Original Sin”, p.77, Vintage

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• Every island to a child is a treasure island.

  P. D. James

  Children, Islands, Treasure

  P. D. James (2008). “The Lighthouse”, p.82, Faber & Faber

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• Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

  P. D. James

  Dream, Writing, Style

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• In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

  P. D. James

  Reality, Risk, Age

  P. D. James (2011). “Devices and Desires”, p.211, Vintage

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• If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

  P. D. James

  Pride, Overcoming, Novelists

  FaceBook post by P.D. James from Mar 02, 2013

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• Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

  P. D. James

  Life, Pain, Broken

  FaceBook post by P.D. James from Apr 12, 2013

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