Literary Birthday – 22 August – Peter James
Happy Birthday, Peter James, born on 22 August 1948.
Peter James Quotes
- Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.
- …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.
- Music is an important part of my writing process.
- 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.
- 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.
- To read is human, to review is divine.
- Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.
Source for quotes
Read: Peter James’ 7 Top Writing Tips
Peter James is the bestselling British author of the Detective Roy Grace novels, which started with Dead Simple. The series, set in Brighton, has been translated into 38 languages with sales of over 24 million copies. An ITV series of the novels is in its seventh season. The latest book is The Hawk Is Dead. In 2016 he was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award for sustained excellence. He was also given the WHSmith Best Crime Author of All Time Award. In 2026, Peter was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in His Majesty The King’s Birthday Honours List, in recognition of his services to literature and to charity. Read our Interview with Peter James and follow him on Instagram.
Image source: Writers Write Event
by Amanda Patterson
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