P. D. James Quotes

I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.

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.

We cannot aspire to a "classless society", whatever that may mean, if some children are disadvantaged the moment they open their mouths, or if we arrogantly assume that only the young from certain backgrounds are capable of enjoying Shakespeare. Language and literature are not static. They change, develop, grow from the past and feed on the past. If we simply cease to care, if we debase, abuse, neglect our language and our literature, the time will come when reading will be the pursuit of a privileged élite and we shall no longer produce books worth reading or have a language and literature worth preserving.

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.

Because English is spoken and written in so many forms for a variety of purposes throughout the world it is surely important that English in its highest form should be taught, spoken and valued in this country. Yet few would deny that standards of written and spoken English are in decline among all sections of the community and that we are in real danger of becoming an illiterate society.

Unless the young can use language effectively, both to express their own minds and to understand the minds of others, it is difficult to see how we can have a vigorous democracy in which ideas and policies can be intelligently presented, considered and criticised or achieve that understanding with other countries which nations enjoy through access to each other's language and literature.

My English teacher, Miss Daisy Dalgliesh, really made Shakespeare live for me, although I didn't see it on stage until I was an adult. I named my detective after her. It was years later that I found out her father was called Adam Dalgliesh.

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.

I always had a sceptical and slightly morbid caste of mind, so my first response to Humpty Dumpty was "Did he fall or was he pushed?" I was drawn to the macabre, and for some reason I was very interested, from earliest childhood, in death. I seemed to think about it a great deal. It may have been something to do with the war, which overshadowed my childhood. My father talked about it a lot. It was like a great universal pain.