Peter James may refer to:
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.
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.
I like dogs. Dogs don't judge people.
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've always been much more scared of the living than I am of the dead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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.
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.
Death is just nature's way of making room for the less experienced.
To read is human, to review is divine.
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.
Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.