P. D. James Quotes

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

The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

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

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.

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.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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