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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

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
Status
Dignity
Meaning
Wasn
Dreaded
Found
Traumatic
Work
Bestow
Men
Unemployment
People
Retirement

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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
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No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.
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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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.
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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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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.
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