Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by P. D. James

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

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.

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.

Every island to a child is a treasure island.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

The greatest mystery of all is the human heart.

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.

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.