It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. — Agatha Christie
Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one! — Yevgeny Yevtushenko
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. — Raymond Chandler
I'm sort of fascinated by the whole espionage crime thing. — Aaron Eckhart
We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. — A. A. Gill
Mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity. — John Adams
Mystery is an intellectual process... But suspense is essentially an emotional process. — Alfred Hitchcock
If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. — Demetri Martin
I loved ghost stories, creaky staircases, stormy nights. If it guaranteed nightmares I read it by flashlight, after midnight. — Lisa Gardner
I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie). — Connie Willis
Nothing matters but the facts. Without them, the science of criminal investigation is nothing more than a guessing game. — Blake Edwards
Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions. — Agatha Christie
Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse. — Dorothy L. Sayers
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
Short Detective Stories Quotes
Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil. — Lord Byron
I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge. — Immanuel Kant
Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity. — Tacitus
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
Detective Stories Image Quotes
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.
Detective Stories Quotes
Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid — Raymond Chandler
We're living in an upside-down era. Regulators detect danger only when a critical mass of citizens has become alarmed. Newsrooms report stories only when the embarrassment of not reporting them becomes unbearable. Universities teach lessons screened by students. It won't end well. — Bret Weinstein
Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid. — Arthur Conan Doyle
You have the power to say - This is not how my story will end.
I made the key discovery for CRISPR there, while living in my scientific monastery in northern Sweden. At the same time, I was very interested in detective stories, searching for enigmas. — Emmanuelle Charpentier
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner
Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight. — Dashiell Hammett
Behind every girl's favorite song there is an untold story.
American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form. — Chester Himes
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order. — P. D. James
Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories. — Jeffery Deaver
Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living. — Dorothy L. Sayers
Detective Fiction Quotes
My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of. — Dashiell Hammett
The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. — Raymond Chandler
One bad chapter does not mean your story is over.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel,
and the deader the corpse the better. — S. S. Van Dine
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Do not judge my story by the chapter you walked in on.
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again. — Joseph Wambaugh
I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. — Raymond Chandler
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
I am talking about the general psychological health
of the species, man. He needs the existence of
mysteries. Not their solution. — John Fowles
Detective Quotes
Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well. — Frantz Fanon
I can smell bullshit from a mile away but it's so much harder to detect when it's around you all day. — Dane Cook
Breast cancer deaths in America have been declining for more than a decade. Much of that success is due to early detection and better treatments for women. I strongly encourage women to get a mammogram. — Larry Craig
You Can, end of story !
History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done. — Sydney J. Harris
In 'whichever direction' you may turn your gaze you will find One Eternal Indivisible Being manifested. Yet, it is not at all easy to detect this Presence, because He interpenetrates everything. — Anandamayi Ma
If the origin of life is the origin of evolution & nothing comes before life then we are indeed stuck. I don’t think we need to be. Let’s shed the dogma, ego, & closed minds & ask the question clearly. How do we detect the onset of evolution BEFORE biology? — Lee Cronin
Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.
The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect. — Mark Twain
Remind thyself, in the darkest moments, that every failure is only a step toward success, every detection of what is false directs you toward what is true, every trial exhausts some tempting form of error, and every adversity will only hide, for a time, your path to peace and fulfillment. — Og Mandino
Even many of the things that we say we have seen, we’ve actually just seen instruments detect those things. We’re watching the effects through instruments and then theorizing that there are other universes out there where the photons are interacting with the photons that we can see. — Naval Ravikant
Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. — Arthur Conan Doyle
Detective Work Quotes
I know when I was here prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, one of the most effective units here was the cold case squad, which had on it FBI agents, as well as Metropolitan Police Department homicide detectives working together. — Robert Mueller
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected. — Henry David Thoreau
They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work. — Arthur Conan Doyle
Your past is just a story, and once you realise this, It has not power over you.
Anything is easy to the man who sees.... The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised. — Samuel Hopkins Adams
Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'. — Bram Cohen
You just work really hard and scrutinize. What is it called in politics? "Opposition research"? You want to do the detective work on your client so to speak before your opponent can dig it up. We're vetting everything thoroughly. — James Ponsoldt
Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again. — Mary Lee Settle
Since 2001, the Patriot Act has provided the means to detect and disrupt terrorist threats against the U.S. Prior to enactment of the law, major legal barriers prevented intelligence, national defense, and law enforcement agencies from working together and sharing information. — Roger Wicker
Chuckling to herself, Nancy said aloud, "Romance and detective work won't mix tonight! — Carolyn Keene
So, I got into the law enforcement game. I worked for an outfit called Newton Detective Agency for a while. I worked eight hours on the waterfront making sure the longshoremen didn't take too many things. — Clint Walker
What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it. — Dashiell Hammett
The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world's books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn't read its books, it borrows a detective story instead. — Stephen Leacock
Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns. — Sergio Aragones
Boredom has been used as a technique, it is a device. In Zen, boredom is used as a device: you are bored to death, and you are not allowed to escape. You are not to go outside, you are not to entertain yourself, you are not to do, you are not to talk, you are not to read novels and detective stories. No thrill. No possibility to escape anywhere. — Osho
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game. — Rex Stout
I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside. — Steig Larsson
I love the rabbit hole. I spend a lot of time looking at images, Google mapping, etc. I also love to read court transcripts, FBI files, stuff like that. You go through vast, boring stretches, but the voices are always so fascinating and slowly a story begins to emerge. It's very much like playing detective. — Zachary Lazar
Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones. — Rex Stout
Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature. — Steig Larsson
Where there's a will there's a detective story. — Carolyn Wells
The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds. — Philip Guedalla
If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story. — Rex Stout
There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks. — Dorothy L. Sayers
I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life kind of a detective story. — Stephen Hopkins
The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention. — Thomas R. Insel
Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism. — V. S. Pritchett
The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing. — Raymond Chandler
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life. — Carl Jung
One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. — Arthur C. Clarke
All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense. — Robert Cormier
make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. — Dorothy L. Sayers
When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough. — Carolyn Wells
There's a structure to a detective story that I can easily understand. I understand playing that particular game. It's like solving a puzzle. Or creating a puzzle. — Christopher Bollen
I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story. — Mary Lavin
In the march up the heights of fame there comes a spot close to the summit in which man reads nothing but detective stories. — Heywood Hale Broun
The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age. — Carl Jung
In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine. — Steig Larsson
I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting! — Marie Windsor
It's a very, very fascinating story for me, cause it's about a man who's been doing bad; bad things. And he's a father of four children in parochial school, he's a lieutenant of detectives, but he's in conflict with himself and with trying to do what's right. — Harvey Keitel
I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world. I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then. — Lee Grant
I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy. — Alan Greenspan
In Conclusion
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