Quotes from Peter James

Death is just nature's way of making room for the less experienced.

We don't rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses

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

There's a really classic cliche every time you switch the TV on - you see cops arguing. I have spent a day a week for many years in the presence of police and I have never seen them argue. It's a military hierarchy. They do what they're told. There's no bickering.

The police feel that most of the public are against them and that there is a lot of bad feeling.

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.

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.

...I don't have concrete plans for the future. I just think of success and keep a successful attitude. Success is 99 percent preparation. If you set yourself up for winning, rarely will you fail.

Almost every officer is going to put their life on the line at some point in their career.

I think the police are a major part of the glue that holds civilised life together. They're not highly paid.

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.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

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.

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.

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.

All men lie. That's how they operate. if you want a longterm relationship with a man you've got to understand it's going to be with a liar. It's in their nature - it's genetic, it's a bloody Darwinian acquired characteristic for survival, OK? They tell you what they want you to hear.

The world is changing and people don't like change.

Perspective. Everything was about perspective. One man's darkness was another man's daylight. How come so many people did not realize that?

I'm sure that's when you really know you are happy - when you wake up wanting to embrace your future, rather than trying to squirm away from your past.

We should all let our inner voices take control from time to time. Let them have their say. We let them take control when we're driving down the motorway sometimes, and they don't do a bad job. Maybe we all need to have a little more faith in ourselves.

That's the one good thing about the human brain, it constantly revises the past, cutting bits here, adding bits there, presenting it in an even more palatable way - the way we would have liked things to have been, rather than the way they really are.

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.

He remembered a conversation he'd once had with a Chief Constable some years back, when he asked the Chief if in his experience he believed there was such a thing as the 'perfect murder'. The Chief had replied that there was. 'It's the one we never hear about,' he said.

We're not very good as a species at looking into the future. It's much easier to look back at the past. We can edit out the bits we don't like, reinvent ourselves. But there's nothing about the future we can edit or reinvent. Most people are prisoners of the future just as much as they are prisoners of their genes.