Fiction Guardian Quotes by P. D. James

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.

— P. D. James

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

— P. D. James

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well…

— P. D. James

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

— P. D. James

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,…

— P. D. James

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

— P. D. James

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

— P. D. James

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

— P. D. James

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

— P. D. James

read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the…

— P. D. James

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age…

— P. D. James

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

— P. D. James