Top 65 Crime Novel Quotes
#1. Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.
Jo Nesbo
#2. I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.
Noah Baumbach
#3. He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.
Richard K. Morgan
#4. I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.
Alastair Reynolds
#5. It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.
Mark Billingham
#6. When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.
Richard House
#7. I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.
John Gordon Sinclair
#8. 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
#9. I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
James Ellroy
#10. 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
#11. I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.
Val McDermid
#12. 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
#13. My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read ... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.
Ann Cleeves
#14. 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
#15. The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children.
Emma Donoghue
#16. My first crime novel, "Wild Horses," sold at auction, and that changed my life at an ideal time.
Brian Hodge
#17. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.
Ali Smith
#18. On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does.
Sharon Bolton
#19. The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.
Michael Connelly
#20. The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.
Val McDermid
#21. 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
#22. I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.
John Scalzi
#23. In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.
Sophie Hannah
#24. Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.
Michael Koryta
#25. I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?
David Lagercrantz
#26. Just because it's got a gun doesn't make it a crime novel, and just because there's a horse doesn't make it a western.
Daniel Woodrell
#27. Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is such an important novel in terms of suspense and setting a perfect scene for crime
Alanna Knight
#29. Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.
Elliott Colla
#30. After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber.
Brian Azzarello
#31. 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
#32. Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad.
Rebecca McNutt
#33. In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way.
Adrian McKinty
#35. I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.
Garry Disher
#36. Sqwaak!" from Fletcher, the environmental crime fighting parrot in The Big Belch graphic novel by Kay Wood.
Kay Wood
#37. I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes
Lauren Bradshaw
#38. In the world of crime novels, the annual Audible Sounds of Crime awards are a pretty big deal, and I was thrilled to be shortlisted for my fifth novel in my bestselling Nic Costa series.
David Hewson
#39. I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'
Sophie Hannah
#40. How the Hell is it we go to pick up Jenna Jameson and end up with the fucking chick from those Kill Bill movies?
Todd Morr
#41. Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat.
Ed Lynskey
#42. All I've really ever done is write since I was 17, so I don't know anything about anything. For me to do a novel, I have to talk to people who know things. And what keeps me in suspense is that I am a crime aficionado.
Lisa Gardner
#43. A diamond wedding ring, you say?"
I studied his face. Was he putting me on? He looked earnest. "As any guy would expect, a diamond is what she's after," I said. "Did you hold out hope you'd get by for anything less?
Ed Lynskey
#44. His body sang with electric energy at their closeness. He'd been physical with many girls in the past, but he'd never felt anything quite like this. They were barely touching and yet every sense in his body was raging like the surface of a storming sea.
Anam Iqbal
#45. Quote taken from Chapter 1:
That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham.
Ed Lynskey
#46. Doing crime films ... maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.
William Monahan
#47. I don't mind my friends calling me "Thornes," but the fact of people calling me "Prickly Thornes" draws the line.
Simi Sunny
#48. Every happy moments looks perfect till it gets messy
Sheeja Jose
#49. Do we really mean it when we say 'in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part or do we add a silent clause, 'unless you shame me or disappoint me?' What is the cost of unconditional love and how capable are we of giving that?
Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker
#50. This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.
Mark Zero
#51. I will only write the novel, if I can solve the crime
Andrew Hixson
#52. There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
Zadie Smith
#53. Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that.
Ed Lynskey
#54. Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face.
Randolph Randy Camp
#55. The first teacher, the first kiss, and the first crime. I've always been hindered by my dislike for repetition. The first time you do anything, it's creative, but from then on it's just work.
Elizaveta Mikhailichenko
#56. When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.
Sara Sheridan
#57. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
James Crumley
#58. 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
#59. To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.
Christopher McQuarrie
#60. His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles.
Stephen King
#61. In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball.
Ed Lynskey
#62. It's getting a little chilly in here! Why don't we sit by the fireplace and I'll tell you the story of how I single handedly killed the Medina boys!
Angel Ramon Medina
#63. Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.
Murder in the Dog Park
Jill Yesko
#64. All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
Carl Hiaasen
#65. I do like Captain Beefheart (Trout Mask Replica is a misunderstood masterpiece!) and I do have two kids but I've never written a prize winning novel called Oh, Bollocks!
Jon Edgell
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