P. D. James Quotes

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

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.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

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.

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.

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.

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.

A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?

When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

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.

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

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?

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

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

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.

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.

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

The equally is a political theory, but no a practical politics.

Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.

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.

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

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.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.