Wednesday, May 28, 2008

P D James on Letter Writing

“A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment, the transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence. And we adapt our style to our correspondent.”

Source: P D James, Time to be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 79.

Image: “A letter captures the mood of the moment…”