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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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
Restoration
Murder
Story
Order
Stories
Detective
Detectives
More quotes by P. D. James
No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
P. D. James
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
however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
P. D. James
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
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
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.
P. D. James
I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
P. D. James
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
P. D. James
Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
P. D. James
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
P. D. James
Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
P. D. James
The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.
P. D. James
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
Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
P. D. James
Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
P. D. James
gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
P. D. James
A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
P. D. James
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
P. D. James
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
People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
P. D. James
