P. D. James Quotes

• 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

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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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• 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

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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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• 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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• 

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

  P. D. James

  Life, Memories, Fall

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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• 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

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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

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

  P. D. James

  Rejection, Infanticide

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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

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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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• 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

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• however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

  P. D. James

  Spring, Long, Enough

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

  P. D. James

  Sex, Religion, Modern

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• Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

  P. D. James

  Raw Materials, Crafts, Increase

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• Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

  P. D. James

  Writing, Bad Writing, Discrimination

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• Every island to a child is a treasure island.

  P. D. James

  Children, Islands, Treasure

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• What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

  P. D. James

  Grief, Terrible, Over It

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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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• 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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