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Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

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
Despotism
Atmosphere
Creativity
Fear
Doesn
Coercion
Flourish

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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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Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.
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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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A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.
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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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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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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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A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.
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The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.
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Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.
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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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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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