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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
Always
Infanticide
Equate
Authors
Badly
Rejection
Take

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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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Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.
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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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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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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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Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.
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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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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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The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
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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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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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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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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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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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Charm is always genuine it may be superficial but it isn't false.
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We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
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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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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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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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