Literary Birthday – 3 August – P.D. James

P.D. James was born on 3 August 1920 and died on 27 November 2014.

P.D. James Quotes

1. I think that when one writes detective stories one is imposing order, and a form of imperfect but human justice, on chaos.
2. I don’t think that we necessarily choose our genre; the genre chooses us.
3. Oh, I know all the swear words, my dear, and use them myself sometimes, in private. But I see no need for them in my books.
4. A detective story can give a much truer picture of the society in which it’s written than a more prestigious literature. …And if I’m lucky enough to be read in 50 years’ time, I hope people will be able to point to them and say: that’s what it was like.
5. I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.
6. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.
7. From an early age I used to tell imaginative stories to my younger brother and sister. I lived in the world of the imagination and I did something that other writers have told me they did as children—I described myself inwardly in the third person: She brushed her hair and washed her face, then she put on her nightdress … as if I were standing outside myself and observing myself. I don’t know whether this is significant, but I think writing was what I wanted to do—almost as soon as I knew what a book was.
8. It takes me as long to develop the plot and work out the characters as to write the book. Sometimes longer. So once I’ve got the setting, I begin to get in touch with the people, as it were, and last of all the clues.
9. When I first started writing I got up early and wrote from six to eight, as I had to go to work. The habit has stuck and I still get up early and write in the morning. When I’m writing a book, I get up before seven, go down to the kitchen and make tea, listen to the news on the radio, and have a bath, then I settle down to work. I find that after a few hours I can’t go on and I stop around twelve.
10. I don’t write in a particular place, and I can, in fact, write anywhere provided I have absolute peace and privacy.

P. D. James was an English crime writer. She was most famous for a series of detective novels starring policeman and poet, Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh rises ‘from chief inspector in the first novel to chief superintendent and then to commander. He is a serious, introspective person, moralistic yet realistic. The novels in which he appears are peopled by fully rounded characters, who are civilized, genteel, and motivated.’ James wrote 14 Dalgliesh novels, with the final one, The Private Patient, published in 2008. Other works include Death Comes to Pemberley and the mundane science fiction novel, The Children of Men. Her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, was published in 2000. She was made OBE in 1983 and was named a life peer in 1991.

Source for Image: Benutzer: Smalltown Boy (Diskussion), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PD_James_Cologne.JPG

by Amanda Patterson
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