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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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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
Wish
Pattern
Order
Disorder
Think
Genre
Thinking
Patterns
Wrote
Writers
Choose
Liking
Create
Chooses

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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with 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?
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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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.
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Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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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.
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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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?
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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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.
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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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