Peter James Quotes
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Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. 'I read a while ago,' he told Branson, 'that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer and they live longer too. You know the moral of this story? 'No' 'It's not what you eat or drink - it's speaking English that kills you.
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I've always been much more scared of the living than I am of the dead.
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Brighton has two universities. It's got a massive young, middle-class community, and the largest gay community in the UK. The result of which is a huge recreational drug market. It's the favoured place to live in the UK for first division criminals.
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I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops.
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If you go into a bar or restaurant with a cop, the first thing he does is he'll stand in the entrance, and he'll look at every single face in that room because he doesn't want to spend an hour having a drink or lunch and didn't spot some villain they've been looking for, for two years.
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There's a difference between what I call a dumb ghost and a smart ghost. The smart ghost is Hamlet's father - you know, he says, "Get revenge, my son!" That's incredibly rare. It's much more the grey lady in the same place everyday, moving across the floor.
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Life's not some slot machine in an arcade with a sign that flashes up saying 'I'm sorry, you have been killed. Would you like another go?' But we might get put through the same test each time, get faced with the same situations until we've learned how to cope.
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What Brighton's got is a major sea port on either side, good for importing drugs, great for exporting cash, stolen cars, stolen antiques. It's got the largest number of antique shops in the UK, so it's a great place to fence stolen goods. It's got tremendous communication: you've got the sea ports, you've got the channel tunnel, you've got Gatwick Airport 25 minutes away, and London's 50 minutes away by train. So all these escape routes... Which is what villains like.
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Music is an important part of my writing process.
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I like dogs. Dogs don't judge people.
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There are people who can achieve huge success in life, while adding a bit of fun and a splash of colour to this increasingly grey world.
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If you talk to any cop, however hardened, and say, "Has anything that's ever bothered you", they'll tell you about the death of a child that they had to deal with.
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Stalin was experimenting with telepathy in the 1930's. Winston Churchill had a paranormal office, trying to get people to travel out of their bodies and see behind enemy lines in the Second World War. And the Pentagon... The X-Files is based on a real department in the Pentagon, that's still there now. Pretty much every government, probably as far back in time as we can go, has one. And the police will quite often - and when I say often, I mean often - they will go to mediums if all else fails in the enquiry.
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We're full of electricity, and the walls and floor of a building contain carbon - the same makeup as a video tape - and I think we give off a huge amount of energy. Some people are able to see that and pick that up. I think almost every person I've met in my life has had some sort of experience that they can't explain, and those fascinate me.
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Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.
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I guess a lot of police keep their sanity by developing black humour.
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I think the police are a major part of the glue that holds civilised life together. They're not highly paid.
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I travel abroad constantly on book promotion and research, and the Internet is invaluable to me for accessing U.K. news in places such as America, which most of the time hasn't heard of England.
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There are an awful lot of readers who won't pick up a book if they think it's got anything horrific in it, or paranormal or whatever.
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The biggest qualification to be a good police officer is to have a high degree of emotional intelligence.
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A news junkie, I read, daily, the 'Times/Sunday Times,' the 'Guardian/Observer,' 'Mail,' and the 'Argus' - both to keep up with crime in Brighton, where I set my novels, and because I think it is vital to support local papers - they provide a unique accountability for councils, emergency services and so much else, and are dangerously undervalued.
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Most good police officers are very open-minded. The bad ones are the ones who are close-minded.
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Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.
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I get asked to read new works a lot, in the hope that I will give a quotation and I will only give a 'puff' for a book I truly love.
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Brighton is a beautiful seaside city, but it's got a dark underbelly.
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Most of us have one big idea at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.
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Almost every officer is going to put their life on the line at some point in their career.
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My day starts with Radio 4's Today live or 'listen again' wherever I am in the world, thanks to digital radio - I even have an app on my iPhone that receives it.
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Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.
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Police do get obsessed with solving crimes. You know, particularly if there's been a murder, it becomes personal for the police officer very quickly, and it gets to the family. Even after they've retired, they carry on, not letting go.
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