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Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

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
Men
Fought
Wars
Decent
War
May

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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.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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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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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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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.
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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.
P. D. James
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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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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.
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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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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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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.
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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.
P. D. James
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
P. D. James
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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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.
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