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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
Guilty
Mysteries
Aren
Nowadays
Mystery
Sorts
Especially
Secrets
Coming
Motive
Secret
Sexual
Credible
Today
Sell
Preventing
People
Sells
Motives

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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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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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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
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the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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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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All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.
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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.
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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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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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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But what do you believe? I don't just mean religion. What are you sure of? That once I was not and that now I am. That one day I shall no longer be.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
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