P. D. James Quotes (1920-2014)

“I knew that what I had felt was envy or regret, not for something lost but for something never achieved.”

“One of my earliest loves was the Book of Common Prayer. I was seduced by it, by its beautiful words and the sense of history.”

“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.”

“We also had the inestimable advantage of beginning each school day with an act of worship which included a reading from the King James Bible which, with the Book of Common Prayer, has had more influence on our language, literature, history and culture than any other book, but which today a majority of our children will never encounter.”

“Above all she is a literary conjuror who places her pasteboard characters face downwards and shuffles them with practised cunning.”

“I read Pride and Prejudice when I was about 8 or 9. It was the first adult novel I read and it opened my imagination to the immense possibilities of the world of fiction and, young though I was, produced an immediate response to Jane Austen that has remained as strong today as it was 85 years ago and, I believe, helped to make me a writer.”

“the lesbian community is under siege, we always try to present to the heterosexual community the idealized version, but I do not think that's a good way to do it, even though I can understand where it's coming from. ("Valerie Miner talked about the kinds of self-censorship she finds in her work when she starts thinking she should present only positive images of lesbians or working-class people.") Yes. In that poem and also in the poem "Night Voice" I do that. There's this whole controversy now over media images of lesbians and gays and bisexuals. It's brought out in movies like Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs where they are presented as killers. It comes up in the novels of P. D. James, where she has these criminals who are lesbians or gay men. And I hate that. But, at the same time, I want the dirty laundry to be out there, whether it's on the Mexican culture or the lesbian culture or the bisexual. And I'm not sure how you do that.”