Latest Peter James Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The biggest qualification to be a good police officer is to have a high degree of emotional intelligence.

  Peter James

  Emotional, Police, Degrees

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Real, War, Mean

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• Most good police officers are very open-minded. The bad ones are the ones who are close-minded.

  Peter James

  Police, Open Minded, Close Minded

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Wall, Makeup, Thinking

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Revenge, Smart, Father

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• There's no question that ghosts exist. The big question for me is whether ghosts are simply electronic imprints left in the walls or the atmosphere of places, or whether they do actually represent something from the afterlife.

  Peter James

  Wall, Afterlife, Atmosphere

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• I've always been much more scared of the living than I am of the dead.

  Peter James

  Scared

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• If you and I took a walk down a shopping street in Jo'burg or Cape Town or London, we see two guys looking in a shop window, we think, "Oh, they're wondering what they're going to buy." A cop looks at them and thinks, "Why are they standing there? Are they doing a drug deal? Are they going to mug someone? Are they going to rob the shop?"

  Peter James

  Thinking, Shopping, Two

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Letting Go, Police, Murder

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Years, Two, Lunch

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• Every profession has its own culture, but the police look at the world differently to everybody else. I call it a 'healthy culture of suspicion'.

  Peter James

  Healthy, Police, World

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• I guess a lot of police keep their sanity by developing black humour.

  Peter James

  Police, Black, Sanity

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Children, Cop, Deals

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• Women are afraid of walking at night, that someone pulls them into an alley and rapes them. That almost never happens. I mean, 98% of people who are raped, are raped by somebody they know. Somebody goes too far. But the destruction is just the same.

  Peter James

  Mean, Night, People

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Gay, Class, Two

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

  Peter James

  Ideas, Theme, Bigs

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Communication, Airports, Sea

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• Brighton is a beautiful seaside city, but it's got a dark underbelly.

  Peter James

  Beautiful, Dark, Cities

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• I think that Brighton, for a crime writer, is almost like a character.

  Peter James

  Character, Thinking, Crime

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Book, Thinking, Awful

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• Obviously I don't have whatever it is you need to be a successful writer.

  Peter James

  Successful, Needs

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature.

  Peter James

  Book, Ghetto, Literature

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za

• 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.

  Peter James

  Writing, Pigeons, Kind

  Source: blog.exclus1ves.co.za