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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

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P. D. James
Age: 94 †
Born: 1920
Born: August 3
Died: 2014
Died: November 27
Member Of The House Of Lords
Novelist
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Phyllis Dorothy James
Phyllis Dorothy James
Baroness James of Holland Park
Phyllis James
Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James
Short
Novelists
Fiction
Overcome
Even
Prejudice
Make
Overcoming
Brilliant
Contrive
Period
Subdued
Periods
Credible
Pride
Novelist

More quotes by P. D. James

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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
P. D. James
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If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?
P. D. James
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It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words justice, compassion, society, struggle, evil, would be unheard echoes on an empty air.
P. D. James
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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
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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
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It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.
P. D. James
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Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
P. D. James
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Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
P. D. James
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
P. D. James
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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
P. D. James
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
P. D. James
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Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.
P. D. James
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First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
P. D. James
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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
P. D. James
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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
P. D. James