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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
Work
Escapists
Escapist
Shouldn
Literature
Art
Also
More quotes by P. D. James
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.
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
Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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
Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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
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.
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
A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
P. D. James
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
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
however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
P. D. James
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
P. D. James
Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
P. D. James
Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.
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
The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
P. D. James
It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
P. D. James
read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.
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
