Peter James Quotes

My wife is a former homicide detective, LAPD. The wonderful thing that I was able to capture is my wife's experiences from human and professional, and how do you deal with some of the atrocities that happen in L.A. and not bring them home.

It’s hard to absorb the horrors of the world on a daily basis.

War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.

I think what's always been interesting to me than the science and the criminality with this job is what happens to your persona, your disposition, after day in and day out dealing with life and death.

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

Images of dead children are so excruciating that we are now well trained to short-circuit our emotional responses to move from horror to suspicion to indifference.

I think a lot of officers go into that line of work because they have a calling for it. But at some point, they find themselves in the middle of their lives having seen some of the darkest things that are just unimaginable to the rest of us.

I can't imagine having to it to walk into murder scenes, and then trying to let that go, at the end of the day, and going home to your own family to live a normal life.

My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.

Within three or four months, the average girl will just get used up. It just takes your soul, you know? It just takes your soul.

I'm a child who was abused. I know the difference. I clearly know the difference. The whipping for correction and then their child abuse.

If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect for humanity.

The honest truth is that it was just traumatizing with the piano, with the authority of the piano teacher, getting rapped across the knuckles, and so whenever you put a piece of music in front of me, there's a Pavlovian reaction where it starts off.

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

I still wrestle with the catharsis of acting. I don't end up playing a lot of likable characters, so I find myself living in a lot of unlikable skin. As a result of that I don't always feel good.

I was one of those people raised by a woman who was what I call a prisoner of war. She was captured, she didn't want to be there, she was unhappy, she was banging away in the kitchen, the way that a prisoner would bang on her jail cell, you know, really unhappy. She had to cook for nine people with really little money, so she really just got burned out. So I didn't know that you could actually cook and it would be calming, pleasurable.

Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It's as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.

Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.

It gets super dark. I did a bunch of intense indie movies when I was starting out in my career and I was always in a bad mood because, when you're dealing with the subject matter of losing your baby, getting raped and all that stuff, it's not fun to go through. You really have to go there.

I can't do what my mother did, which is tell me every single day of my life about her labor and how long it was and how it was 36 hours of hell .

When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

The hurt affects your ability to go forward.

The nature of bad news affects the teller.

I'm scared of myself. I think I'd be a bad driver. I'm scared of cars, period. I've had too many friends killed now, and I've seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I've had a lot of relatives killed. I've had a lot of dear friends killed. It's stupid. The whole activity is stupid.