Quotes from P. D. James

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

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

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

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.

Of all the things that human beings did together, the sexual act was the one with the most various of reasons.

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

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

Love, always love. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for.

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.

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.

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 fake.

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?

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

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

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

[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.

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

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

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.

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

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

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.

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