P. D. James

I still occasionally need to struggle but I now fear it less. The weapons I fight it with are also my consolations: books, music, food, wine, nature.

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

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

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

It is surely unreasonable to credit that only one small star in the immensity of the universe is capable of developing and supporting intelligent life. But we shall not get to them and they will not come to us.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.

It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.