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 orde… - P. D. James

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.

He had learned to be as wary of intuition as he was of superficial judgements, but it was hardly possible to be a long-serving detective officer and not know when a witness was lying. It wasn't always suspicious or even significant. Nearly everyone had something to hide. And it was optimistic to expect the whole truth at a first interview. A wise suspect answered questions and kept his counsel; only the naïve confused a police officer with a social worker.

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.