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"Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!"
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"In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"From the tens of thousands of criminals I have mixed with behind bars and in the streets or have known of over the last three decades of my criminally active life, the Eighties, Nineties and Naughties, I have selected the crème de la crème of the toughest, maddest, hardest Scottish bastards that have ever drawn breath."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Once the cons were in the cell, they'd pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn't placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn't think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When Barlinnie's Prison doctor, Dr Danson, came to see Dingus, he turned in disgust at the state Dingus was left to lie in. Doctor Danson refused to treat him as he knew Dingus's injuries were life threatening, he told the top warden that Dingus would need to be rushed to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency surgery. The screws in the seg block refused to listen to the doctor, they pushed and manhandled their own doctor out of Dingus's cell and threatened him with a severe beating if he made anything public about Dingus's injuries."
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Personal Development
"Despotism is a long crime."
Author Name
Personal Development
"As equally as one may use size, the cunning James Crosbie was once classified as the most dangerous man in Scotland, notorious for his daring bank robberies and escaping on a bicycle. He was the criminal mastermind behind many successful crimes carried out throughout the UK."
Author Name
Personal Development
"They ask themselves: "What will he do? "How will he react? "Will he go mad? "Will he bite? "Will he be armed? They're pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I'm cool as a cat! The name 'Charles Bronson' causes panic! The name 'Mickey Peterson' causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I'm the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It's a fact. So here I am years later, and I'm still the madman. There is no escaping my past."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I pulled the homemade jail knife out that I had in my hand, Porkie pulled out the very sharp lockback knife that he had concealed up his sleeve. We told the warden and nurse to sit on the floor, and if they did as we told them then no one would get hurt."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Big Rab has worked in Barlinnie's Wendy House for over seven and a half years. The average time a screw works in the seg blocks is two years, this man has seen it and done it all. Most prisoners will agree, he isn't a dog either but can be when he wants. He has had legendary roll abouts with some of Scotland's hardest criminals but at the end of it he doesn't hold any grudges."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Although I had committed just about every sort of assault imaginable on people and even the odd one or two against the police, I still had and still do have respect for the old school policeman."
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Personal Development
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"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."
Creativity
"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
Literature
"It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me."
Growth
"Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket."
Integrity
"I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job."
Research
"I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from."
Reflection
"The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial."
Politics
"You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story."
Creativity
"In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it."
Crime
"I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show."
Writing
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