James Watkins Quotes

Any distraction tends to get in the way of being an effective gangster.

When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

There's something quite fascinating with crooks and criminals and all things against the law.

In Paris there are two dens, one for thieves, the other for murderers. The den of thieves is the Stock Exchange; the den of murderers is the Courthouse.

Crime is stupid, lazy and weak. You can only exploit it and make money out of it.

Let me tell you something. Nobody goes to jail unless they want to. Unless they make themselves get caught. They don't have things organized.

'Bonnie and Clyde,' while one of the best movies ever made, was far more interested in portraying Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as romantic anti-establishment Robin Hoods than what they really were: white-trash spree killers.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

I haven't been part of the criminal world.

With a character like James Bulger, you have to approach him as a human. No one wakes up in the morning and says, as they are brushing their teeth, 'I am going to do something evil today.' He was a businessman - in his business, the violence was just part of his job, let's say. It was also the language of the people he associated with and opposed.

I saw that crime pays, but I never got involved in crime.

Well, I'm used to rubbing shoulders with crooks and criminals.

Crime is the number one problem in Russia.

The big thieves hang the little ones.

It takes a crook to catch those crooks.

Foreign Criminals in New York

Bookmaking is the most menacing racket in the entire field of organized crime.

Crime is contagious.

Before science all things must fall, including the ramparts of criminality.

Obviously crime pays, or there would be no crime.

Criminality is not always obvious, in proportion to its extent. The sin of the traffic in intoxicating liquors, was, until the last few years almost universally unfelt and unperceived. But now, we meet with men, who, though it was “in all good conscience,” that they were once engaged in it, would not resume it for worlds; and who see more criminality, in taking money from a fellow man, in exchange for the liquor which intoxicates him, than in simple theft.

Who knows what is really going on within a criminal enterprise? Criminals