P. D. James Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

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 unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

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.

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.

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.

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.