If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. — Demetri Martin
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
Mystery is made a convenient Cover for absurdity. — John Adams
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. — Raymond Chandler
The job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. — Sayings
Mystery is an intellectual process... But suspense is essentially an emotional process. — Alfred Hitchcock
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil. — Lord Byron
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story. — Agatha Christie
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. — Italo Calvino
Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book. — John Donne
The terrain of the mysteries is the ordinary. To seek out mystery, we don't have to go anywhere. We must simply change our preception, our description, our consciousness of where we are. — Starhawk
She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple. — Stella Gibbons
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle — Terence McKenna
Short Mystery Novels Quotes
I'm sort of fascinated by the whole espionage crime thing. — Aaron Eckhart
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. — Milan Kundera
Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes. — Esther Perel
It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit. — Antoine Rivarol
I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie). — Connie Willis
Mystery Novels Image Quotes
The ocean is everything I want to be. Beautiful, mysterious, wild and free.
Crime Novels Quotes
It's what's in *yourself* that makes you happy or unhappy. — Agatha Christie
I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here. — Peter Temple
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller. — Jo Nesbo
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why we call it present.
The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers. — James Ellroy
I'm not a big crime reader, but I'm reading Michael Connelly's 'The Reversal.' I'm going back to his novels. I'm also reading Keith Richards' 'Life.' I'm always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late '60s and early '70s and the youth culture becoming an industry. — Jo Nesbo
The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character. — Elizabeth George
Yesterday is a history; Tomorrow a mystery; Today is a gift; That's why we call it the present
The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern. — Ian Rankin
It's an unusual way to write a crime novel, to have these lingering, fairly large story points, but it's something I knew I had to do if I wanted to write a sequel...but, you know, people still have to read and enjoy this book, or it's a moot point. — Tod Goldberg
Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger. — John Waters
The crime novel has always been my favourite genre. — Sara Paretsky
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
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
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
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
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift.
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
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
Fiction Novels Quotes
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka
We have to be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something. — Orson Scott Card
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message. — Jerry B. Jenkins
Suspense Novels Quotes
Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page. — Sidney Sheldon
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book. — Elizabeth Hand
Absolutely breathtaking, nail-biting, and edge-of-your-seat. Michael Koryta is a master at maintaining suspense and a hell of a good writer. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is one of the best chase-and-escape novels you’ll read this year-or any other year. The pace never lets up. — Nelson Demille
In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict. — Jeffery Deaver
One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective.... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero. — Carolyn Wheat
Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there. — Sergio Aragones
Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense. — Scott Turow
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present. — Lisa Gardner
Crime Fiction Quotes
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers — Jacques Barzun
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. — Linwood Barclay
Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English. — Camilla Lackberg
I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library - I'm a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction - so I'll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I'll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast. — Anthony Geary
A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonists taste in music, or were told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for. — Peter Temple
The built-in form is a window frame. You can use this genre [crime fiction] to go where you want to go, and explore what you want to explore. In some ways it gives you a lot of freedom because you have a framework readers are looking for. — Michael Connelly
People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries. — Denise Mina
I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid. — James Ellroy
Tony Black is the Tom Waits of Crime Fiction, yes, that good. — Ken Bruen
Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers. — Garry Disher
I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you. — Steven Strogatz
I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen
Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel. — John Dalton
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous. — Patrick Marber
I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself. — Patricia Highsmith
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. — Lorrie Moore
Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics. — Jerome K. Jerome
Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States. — Terry Southern
Historical Novels Quotes
Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. — Louis L'Amour
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones. — Lion Feuchtwanger
The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves. — Mary Pope Osborne
There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog. — Vladimir Nabokov
Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present. — Laila Lalami
If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier. — Louis L'Amour
However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned. — Helen Dunmore
There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth. — Peter Straub
As far as benefits to reading historical novels, there are several! For one thing, you learn about life in another era. Secondly, these novels help us to develop a deeper understanding of the legacy of women who came before us and the strides made by our ancestors. — Mary Pope Osborne
Romance Novels Quotes
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices. — Amos Oz
Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth. — Janet Evanovich
Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. — Louis de Bernieres
Life isn't a romance novel. The truth is, the reason romance novels sell so well ---- the reason why everyone loves them ---- is because no one's life is actually like that. Everyone WANTS their life to be like that. — Meg Cabot
As for the military or service professionals, I have nothing but respect for them, but come on, when it comes to romance novels, we all know it's really about the uniforms and how the guys look in them! — Jill Shalvis
I loved him, but love isn't enough. All the fairy tales, the romance novels, the soap operas; they're all lies. Love does not conquer all. — Laurell K. Hamilton
Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss! — Oliver Goldsmith
To a man who is uncorrupt and properly constituted, woman always remains something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem, and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel bindings. — James Parton
Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be. — Mary Wortley Montagu
I'm a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love - and it being more important and special than anything and everything else. — Emma Watson
After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought. — Jeff Greenfield
The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. — Steve Jobs
Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred. — Sherman Alexie
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
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot. — Patricia Highsmith
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. — Ayn Rand
Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere. — Andrea Barrett
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away — Anne Tyler
my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest. — Mary Roberts Rinehart
The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen. — Mary Roberts Rinehart
Amaryllis in Blueberry is a rich, evocative story about an unusual family that will sweep readers away to another place and time. Amaryllis's voice is a spellbinding and unique blend of naivet and wisdom. A perfect melding of family saga, murder mystery and a meditation on faith, loyalty and love, this novel will both haunt and entertain you. — Susan Wiggs
So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein - more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty. — Milan Kundera
I hate the term "mystery". That's not what I write. I think the Scarpetta novels are much more character-driven than an average puzzle solver. Writing should be like a pane of glass - there's another world on the other side and your vision carries you there, but you're not aware of having passed through a barrier to get there. — Patricia Cornwell
Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness. — Elena Ferrante
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot. — Don Delillo
make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. — Dorothy L. Sayers
My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession. — Christopher Bollen
John Green has written a powerful novel—one that plunges headlong into the labyrinth of life, love, and the mysteries of being human. This is a book that will touch your life, so don’t read it sitting down. Stand up, and take a step into the Great Perhaps. — KL Going
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write. — James Rollins
A novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them. — Dan Chaon
I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it. — Peter Orner
Dreamlike sequencing is perhaps one of João Gilberto Noll's most remarkable triumphs in Quiet Creature on the Corner. I translated the novel and still it remains a mystery as to how exactly how this works. Noll thinks more like an experimental filmmaker than a novelist. — Adam Morris
I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you're going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you're traveling, it's fine. — Art Spiegelman
Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us. — Arundhati Roy
It's important to write a mystery novel where the takeaway is not a giveaway - where something could be read over and over. — Jimenez Lai
The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it. — Dana Spiotta
Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference. — Chang-Rae Lee
Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve -- and makes you laugh along the way. — Lena Dunham
I hope my novels will allow you to become lost in a world totally unlike the actual world we live in. I work hard to make the words evoke particular images, thoughts, feelings, the mystery of relationships. — Jay Neugeboren
In a novel there's not much autobiography. There are characters in transit. Naturally, I can project something of my experiences onto the characters, but they have their own autonomy, a personality that is often a mystery to me. — Dacia Maraini
I define a thriller as a big-stakes, multiple-viewpoint novel involving suspense, action, and mystery, in which the reader doesn't know everything but usually knows more than any single character. — F. Paul Wilson
Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel. If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution. — Michael Moorcock
Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery. — Colum McCann
I don't believe that murders can be "solved." I think that this is the big lie of the mystery novel, that you should close the book and feel that the world is back in order and everything's all right. I want the reader to know that the world is not all right, and maybe we ought to do something about it. — George Pelecanos
I would come, many years later, to understand why To Kill A Mockingbird is considered an important novel, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel. — Linda Barnes
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of mystery novels quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about mystery novels to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of mystery novels quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
