128 Quotes by P. D. James

I gave him the qualities I personally admire in either sex—intelligence, courage but not foolhardiness, sensitivity but not sentimentality, and reticence.

Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.

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

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

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious."[Ten rules for writing fiction, The Guardian, 20 February 2010 (with Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, and AL Kennedy)]

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

Had he, during the course of his ministry, changed a single life? He recalled the words of a woman overheard when he was leaving his last parish. 'Father Martin is a priest of whom no one ever speaks ill.' It seemed to him now the most damning of indictments." (p. 243). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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.

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