P. D. James
God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.Collection: God
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.Collection: War
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.Collection: Nature
What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
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.
Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Thinking
we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Stupid
It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.Collection: Want
Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.Collection: Book
Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.Collection: Writing
A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.Collection: Dying
Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Moments
It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.Collection: Judgement
Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Memories
We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.Collection: Charity
however long we have to live, there are never enough springs.Collection: Spring
The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.Collection: Men
The modern holy trinity is money, sex and celebrity.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: New Experiences
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.Collection: Skulls
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.Collection: Order
What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Eye
Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.Collection: Youth
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?Collection: Heart
You never forget the people who were kind to you in childhood, do you, sir?Collection: People
[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.Collection: Father
If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.Collection: Doctors
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.Collection: Faith
The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.Collection: Loss
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Years
Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Regret
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.Collection: Confusing
Every island to a child is a treasure island.Collection: Children
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?Collection: Pride
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.Collection: Sex