Quote

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

P. D. James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Increase
Materials
Word
Words
Power
Craft
Crafts
Material

More quotes by P. D. James

Image
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
P. D. James
Image
we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
P. D. James
Image
Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
P. D. James
Image
First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
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!
P. D. James
Image
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
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
P. D. James
Image
Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.
P. D. James
Image
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
Image
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
P. D. James
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
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
Image
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.
P. D. James
Image
gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
P. D. James
Image
It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
P. D. James
Image
Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.
P. D. James