P. D. James
P. D. James
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, known as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 August 1920
faith teaching people
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.
forgiveness long forgiving
we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.
ambition possibility ifs
Ambition, if it were to be savored, let alone achieved, had to be rooted in possibility.
believe law people
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.
grief terrible over-it
What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.
forgiveness unforgivable forgiven
the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.
giving gossip commodity
gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.
government people moral
No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.
morning believe political
I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!
rejection infanticide
Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.
war men may
Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.
wall fall sat
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
regret writing men
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.
confusing identity senses
Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.