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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
Detective
Detectives
Restoration
Murder
Story
Order
Stories

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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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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.
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
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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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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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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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First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.
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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
P. D. James
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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?
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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain 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.
P. D. James