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.

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.

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

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.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

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

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.

The greatest mystery of all is the human heart,

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?

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

It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.

Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for.

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

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive his daughter than inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn't tainted with guilt and regret.

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.

All fiction is largely autobiographical and much autobiography is, of course, fiction.

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

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

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

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!

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

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

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