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'.

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

...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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Disillusioned, people simply carried out their work as intended, drinking away sobriety at the end of each hard shift and repeating the process until death.

I wonder how many people have been killed, tortured, and in some cases cannibalized, all because certain Christians (mis)applied the book of Joshua to their lives.

I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.

Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good.

No nation can be really great that is held together by Gatling guns, and no true loyalty can be induced and kept through fear.

Real seriousness in regard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.

And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.

Not going to give casual worship to a God of extravagant beauty and grace!

The superior man is never in anyone's way.