Top 85 Mystery Novel Quotes
#1. Secrecy can be sexy. It's essential to any good mystery novel.
Heather Brooke
#2. The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)
Raymond Chandler
#3. 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
#5. Every mystery novel I ever read, the great detective was such an arrogant fuck you could replace 70% of his dialogue with 'Are you stupid?' and the conversation would still make sense.
NisiOisiN
#6. I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.
Rabih Alameddine
#7. Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.
Scott Turow
#8. 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
#9. It's not as though I decided to sit down and write a mystery novel so I could capitalize on my parents' success.
Jesse Kellerman
#10. One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well.
Lauren Willig
#11. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot ...
Don DeLillo
#12. I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel ... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
Alan Bradley
#13. This is a real-life story, Owen," I said. "It's not a mystery novel." In real life, I meant, there was nothing written that the missing father couldn't
John Irving
#14. I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery.
Patrick Rothfuss
#15. 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
#16. My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.
Sherman Alexie
#17. The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.
Adrian McKinty
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#21. I'm an idiot for trying to avoid these feelings because they have caused me pain in the past.
Kellyn Roth
#22. Benjamin Disraeli had anticipated Erewhon's fears in his novel Coningsby: "The mystery of mysteries," he wrote, "is to view machines making machines, a spectacle that fills the mind with curious and even awful speculation.
Ronald Wright
#23. 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
#24. Never give up no matter how tough the road seems,keep going and visualize yourself in the realm of what you are going to achieve.
Sharyan Alleyne
#25. 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
#26. Big results require big ambitions. ~ Heraclitus
B.L. Norris
#27. 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
#28. Red glowing eyes... No one could see her. No one could hear her. No one was coming to save her. Because Death had come sooner than expected.
Humairaa Anseline
#29. I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again.
Steve Hamilton
#30. Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!
Lillian R. Melendez
#31. I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable.
H.C. Deboard
#32. 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
#33. If Miss Elton spoke water instead of words, then there would have been a repetition of Noah's flood.
Kellyn Roth
#34. 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
#35. Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred.
Sherman Alexie
#36. My first three-sisters novel in a while, 'Sandcastles' tells the story of the Sullivan family - two passionate artists and their three wildly different daughters. There's also a renegade nun and a mystery man, but I don't want to give too much away!
Luanne Rice
#38. In this world, there are only 'things that seem like the truth' and 'things that seem like rumors - A-ya
Suzumu
#40. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.
Milan Kundera
#41. Already, Seattle is taking hold of her. She still holds Sedona in the dry tan of her skin and in her hair, but the fine mist of the Northwest is making its way to places she didn't know were parched.
Susan Wiggs
#42. My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'
Eleanor Catton
#43. When I was 26, I wrote my first mystery, 'The Thomas Berryman Number', and it was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then it won an Edgar for Best First Novel. Go figure.
James Patterson
#44. That's where they found the skeletons. Right where you're standing.
Teresa Flavin
#45. She had a way about her that spoke of homemade bread, and caring for people, and the kind of patience that women have when they help a ewe birth a lamb, or stay up in the night with a baby calf bawling for its momma.
James Aura
#46. Why can't relationships come with an instruction manual for unsophisticated adults like me?
Maria Grazia Swan
#47. This novel has it all
mystery, psychological insight, emotional truth, and
most important
characters whose lives matter. You'll fall in love with these families. Solti writes with such passion it is inescapable, lyrical, and profoundly moving. The Forgetting Tree goes on my top ten list.
Jonis Agee
#48. 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
#49. I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.
Lillian R. Melendez
#50. 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
#51. Writers are like onions, layers upon layers upon layers.
Luke Taylor
#52. 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
#53. If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.
Jodi Picoult
#54. 'Shetland' is adapted from the novel 'Red Bones.' The book is based around an archaeological dig, and the mystery starts with the murder of the elderly woman who crofts the land where the dig is happening.
Ann Cleeves
#55. 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
#56. I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.
Alan Rickman
#57. My hobby is to make up these "false stories". The stories that I create impact the public in a completely different form... It's enjoyable when it proceeds just as I expect it to. - A-ya
Suzumu
#59. 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
#60. I felt clueless and nervous--pretty much the same way I'd been feeling ever since I came back from Italy.
Maria Grazia Swan
#61. Focus. She's Maddie. Your friend. Would you eyeball Keith or Dane's butt like that? ~ Zach
Monique DeVere
#62. So, we eat again. Well, perhaps the relationship wouldn't go anywhere, but I would certainly put on a few pounds.
Max Gordon
#63. 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
#64. Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and the scenery looks the same.
Carolyn Wheat
#65. I don't mind my friends calling me "Thornes," but the fact of people calling me "Prickly Thornes" draws the line.
Simi Sunny
#66. Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.
Susanna Kearsley
#67. A magical blending of mystery, romance, and deep and dangerous secrets. Kelly Parra's Invisible Touch is an action-packed coming-of-age novel, sure to keep readers turning pages and begging for a sequel.
Laurie Faria Stolarz
#68. Awoke to find three vultures sitting on the fence. Realizing they were a portent of impending death I shot them.
Bridget Allison
#69. She is my friend, and there is nothing you can say or do that can stop me from helping her.
Peter G. Nogel
#70. What did he say? He is in love? My brain stops, my heart stops, my blood ceases to flow. My appendages go weak and cold, and there is a suspension of all space and time as the universe comes into perfect alignment.
Julie Sarff
#71. Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort.
H.C. Deboard
#72. Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul.
Gary Krist
#73. He wanted a James Lear novel: near to constant episodes of sexual encounters strung together with a bit of mystery, and maybe, for window-dressing, some self-discovery.
Heidi Cullinan
#74. Who is this pompous hobgoblin? His jaw had grown square, his belly had gone soft. He was parading like a dictator in jockey shorts and argyle socks.
Genie Frisbee
#75. He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate.
Patricia Cornwell
#77. In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball.
Ed Lynskey
#79. What to do? Fight it or play along? Was God behind it?
Peter J. Tanous
#80. The right things often happen for the wrong reason.
Alex Adam
#81. 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
#82. We're both in a rut. And when two people have the different open wounds, they can relate and try to heal each other. Maybe it'll be the same for Kayla and me. It'll be a long a run, but we might as well try.
Simi Sunny
#83. What could there be in this document written by a young girl in 1917?
Peter J. Tanous
#84. ...Yes... I am perfect. A perfect 'impostor'. B-ko
Suzumu
#85. 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
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