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Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

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
Never
Chiefs
Acts
Explain
Mysterious
Suicide
Private
Actor
Inexplicable
Actors
Chief

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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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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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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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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Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past without hope of a future he becomes a beast.
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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 and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words justice, compassion, society, struggle, evil, would be unheard echoes on an empty air.
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If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?
P. D. James
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P. D. James
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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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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Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?
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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
P. D. James