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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

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
Escapists
Escapist
Shouldn
Literature
Art
Also
Work

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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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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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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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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.
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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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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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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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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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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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Every island to a child is a treasure island.
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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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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