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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

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
Authors
Badly
Rejection
Take
Always
Infanticide
Equate

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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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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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It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.
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Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.
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A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
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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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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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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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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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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 wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.
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Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.
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however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.
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If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
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the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.
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It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.
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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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