Top 15 P. D. James Quotes

Marriage is both the most public and the most secret of institutions, its miseries as irritatingly insistent as a hacking cough, its private malaise less easily diagnosed. And nothing is so destructive as unhappiness to social life. No one wants to sit in embarrassed silence while his host and hostess demonstrate their mutual incompatibility and dislike.

Every novelist write what he or she needs to write, a subconscious compulsion to express and explain his unique view of reality.

The intention of any novelist must surely be to make that straight avenue to the human heart.

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

If that was what she wanted to believe, why not let her?

You need to decide what you're interested in.

She couldn't remember when her interest in him, in his mysteriousness, his silences, his power, had grown into fascination, but she knew the precise moment when fascination had sharpened into desire.

He had disciplined his mind not to speculate; speculation in advance of the facts was always futile and could be dangerous.

Old age can be very frightening, Commander. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn't just inefficient, he's dangerous.

I was glad to give up teaching, at least in London, glad to be rid of noise and violence and staff-room politics, and the constant fight to keep order.

Over the tea Enid said: "You know who controls this estate, don't you?"
"Yes, the children."
"The kids, the bloody kids. Complain to the police or the council and you get a brick through your window. Tell 'em off and like as not you get an earful of foul language and burning rags through the letter-box next day. And if they catch the little bastards and take them to youth court, what happens? Bloody nothing. They come home laughing. They're in gangs now by the time they're eight."
Of course they are, thought Kate. How else can they survive?

What condemned a man [in a police investigation] was the inability to keep his mouth shut.

How fragile was that elegant, complicated bridge of order and reason which the law had constructed down the centuries over the abyss of social and psychological chaos.

A career which had begun so full of promise but which, like a stream with too feeble a spring, had spent itself with a sad inevitability among the sandy shallows of unrealised ambition.

But of course she knew it. Chambers was a hotbed of gossip. People spoke in front of her. Gossip permeated the very air as if by a mysterious process of osmosis.