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You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?

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
Childhood
Forget
Kind
Never
People

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I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
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we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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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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Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
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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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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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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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gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
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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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We English are good at forgiving our enemies it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
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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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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.
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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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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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.
P. D. James
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The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.
P. D. James