P.D. James Quotes

#1. Love, always love. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for. And if we don't get it early enough we panic in case we never shall.

P.D. James

#2. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

P.D. James

#3. You desire the end but close your eyes to the means. You want the garden to be beautiful, provided that the smell of manure is kept well away from your fastidious nose.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#7. You won't get love from a child if you don't give love.

P.D. James

#8. Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

P.D. James

#9. People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#11. Pleasure need not be less keen because there will be centuries of springs to come, their blossom unseen by human eyes, the walls will crumble, the trees die and rot, the gardens revert to weeds and grass, because all beauty will outlive the human intelligence which records, enjoys and celebrates it.

P.D. James

#12. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

P.D. James

#13. Most of my life I have needed more time to be on my own.

P.D. James

#14. A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

P.D. James

#15. There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell on. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.

P.D. James

#16. I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

P.D. James

#17. It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

P.D. James

#18. Equality is a political theory not a practical policy ...

P.D. James

#19. 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

#20. Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

P.D. James

#21. The most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#23. Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#25. 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

#26. Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

P.D. James

#27. Old age makes caricatures of us all.

P.D. James

#28. We can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

P.D. James

#29. All motives can be explained under the letter L: lust, lucre, loathing and love. They'll tell you the most dangerous is loathing but don't you believe it, boy; the most dangerous is love.

P.D. James

#30. I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people's.

P.D. James

#31. It is some centuries since we accepted that a woman has a soul. Is it not time that we accepted that she also has a mind?

P.D. James

#32. A number of his friends whose wilfully overburdened lives inhibited the enjoyment of all but necessary pleasures somehow found time to take afternoon tea with the Ackroyds in their neat Edwardian villa in Swiss Cottage with its comfortable sitting-room and atmosphere of timeless indulgence.

P.D. James

#33. We are often more merciful to our animals [cats] than we are to each other.

P.D. James

#34. Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

P.D. James

#35. He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation.

P.D. James

#36. For me, the dead remain dead. If I couldn't believe that, I don't think I could go on living.

P.D. James

#37. What is there to be frightened of? We shall be dealing only with men.

P.D. James

#38. Don't let what's happened spoil your life; it doesn't have to. If help is offered, take it if you want it. But in the end, find the strength to take hold of your own life and make what you want of it. Even the bad dreams fade in time.

P.D. James

#39. A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

P.D. James

#40. The attempt to analyse was, of course, an attempt at exorcism.

P.D. James

#41. I love you, Guy, and I think I shall go on loving you, but I'm not in love. I've had that and it was a torment, a humiliation and a warning. So now I'm settling for a quiet life with someone I respect and am very fond of and want to spend my life with.

P.D. James

#42. The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

P.D. James

#43. We need, all of us, to be in control of our lives, and we shrink them until they're small and mean enough so that we feel in control.

P.D. James

#44. Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

P.D. James

#45. 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.

P.D. James

#46. Guilt is more commonly felt by the innocent than by the culpable,

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#48. I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

P.D. James

#49. Fear is the devil to hide.

P.D. James

#50. Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

P.D. James

#51. If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him.

P.D. James

#52. The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels.

P.D. James

#53. But perhaps what mattered at eighty was habit, the body no longer interested in sex, the mind no longer interested in speculation, the smaller things in life mattering more than the large and, in the end, the slow realization that nothing really mattered at all.

P.D. James

#54. If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars.

P.D. James

#55. It is doubtful whether Mrs Bennet missed the company of her second daughter, but her husband certainly did. Elizabeth had always been his favourite child.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#57. I have no scenery to help me and no words are written for me to speak. There is no curtain. But out of the vivid dream of somebody else's life I have to create an atmosphere - for that is advocacy.

P.D. James

#58. Gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#60. Delightful and sensitive boys have a habit of growing into insensitive and far-from-agreeable men.

P.D. James

#61. Right and wrong stood for him as immutable as the two poles. He had never wandered in that twilight country where the nuances of evil and good cast their perplexing shadows.

P.D. James

#62. I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

P.D. James

#63. Like all religious evangelists, she realizes that there is little satisfaction in the contemplation of heaven for oneself if one cannot simultaneously contemplate the horrors of hell for others.

P.D. James

#64. I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

P.D. James

#65. dresses, some of the girls in clothes which

P.D. James

#66. History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

P.D. James

#67. Dalgliesh reflected that one of the minor hazards of a murder investigation was the inordinate amount of caffeine he was expected to consume. But he wanted the interview to be as informal as possible, and food or drink always helped.

P.D. James

#68. He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love.

P.D. James

#69. 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?

P.D. James

#70. There are few activities so agreeable as spending a friend's money to your own satisfaction and his benefit.

P.D. James

#71. Henry James's definition of the purpose of a novel: To help the human heart to know itself.

P.D. James

#72. Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did; it was hardly possible to live without one.

P.D. James

#73. 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.

P.D. James

#74. It is interesting how often unintelligent, even stupid, women manage their emotional lives more satisfactorily than do their cleverer sisters.

P.D. James

#75. 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.

P.D. James

#76. Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.

P.D. James

#77. The television image sanctified, conferred identity. The more familiar the face, the more to be trusted.

P.D. James

#78. Dictating condolences to the mother of a murdered husband whom you've been busily cuckolding for the last three years would take more than his limited social vocabulary.

P.D. James

#79. Love. Is that so very important? You were a teacher, you ought to know. Is it?" "It's vital. If a child has it for the first ten years, hardly anything else matters. If he hasn't, then nothing does.

P.D. James

#80. 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.

P.D. James

#81. [Mr. Collins] began by stating that he could find no words to express his shock and abhorrence, and then proceeded to find a great number, few of them appropriate and none of them helpful.

P.D. James

#82. Even as a child, I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye.

P.D. James

#83. We all die alone. We shall endure death as once we endured birth. You can't share either experience.

P.D. James

#84. You'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

P.D. James

#85. The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.

P.D. James

#86. E began drinking heavily and lived in a way which a friend described as making sense "only if he had no expectations of being alive much beyond Thursday".

P.D. James

#87. With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#89. I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.

P.D. James

#90. We should not, perhaps, assume that nature has a purpose.

P.D. James

#91. All the motives for murder are covered by four Ls: Love, Lust, Lucre and Loathing.

P.D. James

#92. Gossip about the feelings of others when we cannot fully understand them, and they may not understand them themselves, can be a cause of distress.

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

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

P.D. James

#96. Neither man spoke of the past. Darcy could not rid himself of its power but Wickham lived for the moment, was sanguine about the future and reinvented the past to suit his audience, and Darcy could almost believe that, for the present, he had put the worst of it completely out of his mind. p.172

P.D. James

#97. Theo awoke to a weight of vague unease, not heavy enough to be called anxiety, but a mild unfocused depression, like the last tatters of an unremembered but disagreeable dream.

P.D. James

#98. We are neither of us the people we were then. Let us look on the past only as it gives us pleasure, and to the future with confidence and hope.

P.D. James

#99. The very old, he thought, make our past. Once they go it seems for a moment that neither it nor we have any real existence.

P.D. James

#100. God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.

P.D. James