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In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.

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
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Motive
Secret
Sexual
Credible
Today
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Preventing
People
Sells
Motives
Guilty
Mysteries
Aren
Nowadays
Mystery
Sorts

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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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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.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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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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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
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There are two options for any society: total prohibition as in a totalitarian state, or total license. Both avoid the ardours of decision. Both have the attraction of certainty. The difficult option is to decide where the line should be drawn and this, surely, is the responsiblity of any civilized and democratic country.
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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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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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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.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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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.
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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