P. D. James Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

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

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

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.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

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.

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

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

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

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

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

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

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

All these problems [deciding cases] are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don't or can't have to do the best we can. That's what the law is, the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it's the only justice we have.

Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

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

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.

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

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

[My father and his friends] believed in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible.

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.

we live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving ...

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.

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.

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

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

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

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

I thought of inviting you to my other club but you know how it is. Lunching there is a useful way of reminding people that you're still alive, but the members will come up and congratulate you on the fact.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

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.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

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

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

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

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.

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

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

Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.

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.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

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.

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

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

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

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, don't you think?

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

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

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.

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

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

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

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.

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

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

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

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

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

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

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.

I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

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.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

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

I wonder if childhood is ever really happy. Just as well, perhaps. To be blissfully happy so young would leave one always seeking to recapture the unobtainable. Like those people who were always happiest at school or university. Always going back. No reunion ever missed. It always seemed to me rather pathetic.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?