Top 100 Quotes About Crime Fiction
#1. When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.
Sophie Hannah
#2. 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
#3. One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.
Kathy Reichs
#4. You're a crime fiction writer if...The injustices of this world boil your blood. You become a fucking supernova. So you write.
Verge Le Noir
#5. Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.
Ken Bruen
#6. Pushing the boundaries of polite society does not just fall under the purview of crime fiction authors.
Karin Slaughter
#7. The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
Jacques Barzun
#8. Tony Black is the Tom Waits of Crime Fiction, yes, that good.
Ken Bruen
#9. I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.
Ruth Rendell
#10. 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
#11. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
Charles Frazier
#12. Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.
P.D. James
#13. In crime fiction, I just don't write the parts that aren't a thriller and it's exactly the same in my TV reporting - I distill the essence of the story until it's only the jewels of the tale - and leave in only the most compelling and exciting parts.
Hank Phillippi Ryan
#14. The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.
Camilla Lackberg
#15. More wisdom is contained in the best
crime fiction than in philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#16. With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.
John Banville
#17. Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
John Banville
#18. I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader.
Karin Slaughter
#19. When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.
Michael Connelly
#20. For a long time, I missed being in the courtroom every day. I missed trial work. It was so much a part of my life. It was what I did and who I was. But over the years I did find the opportunity to realize my childhood dream of writing crime fiction.
Marcia Clark
#21. There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.
Mark Billingham
#22. 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
#23. I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.
Stieg Larsson
#24. History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.
Edward M. Lerner
#25. When I began to write, I was surprised at how little London had been used in crime fiction. Places such as Edinburgh or Oxford or L.A. seemed to have stronger identities.
Mark Billingham
#26. In traditional crime fiction every detective with any self-respect has an unfailing nose for when people are lying. It's bullshit! Human nature is a vast impenetrable forest which no one can know in its entirety. Not even a mother knows her child's deepest secrets.
Jo Nesbo
#27. Two excellent crime fiction writers I'm currently reading...
Laura Wilson and Andrew Taylor
Roger Boutwell
#28. The crime fiction genre offers the writer infinite diversity of theme and treatment.
Stanley Ellin
#29. A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonist's taste in music, or we're told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.
Peter Temple
#31. So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
Donna Leon
#32. 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
#33. There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.
John Connolly
#34. 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
#35. Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.
Mark Billingham
#36. There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.
Daniel Woodrell
#37. My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.
Diane Setterfield
#38. When I'm working, I always read stuff that's as far away from what I'm working on as possible, so I'll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.
Mal Peet
#39. I'll bet you $10 right now that there are an awful lot of literary writers who started a long time ago and now they find themselves in this place where secretly they feel trapped. And you know what they really read for fun? They read crime fiction.
Robert Crais
#40. Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.
Adrian McKinty
#41. I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon 'Little Sister.' I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.
Robert Crais
#42. 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
#43. I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.
Daniel Woodrell
#44. And there are rules for crime fiction. Or if not rules, at least expectations and you have to give the audience what it wants.
Tod Goldberg
#45. There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.
John Connolly
#46. I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.
Denise Mina
#47. 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
#48. Anyone who says, 'Books don't change anything,' or - more commonly - that crime fiction is the wrong genre for promoting social change - should take a closer look.
Andrew Vachss
#49. Crime fiction is a way of satisfying that nosy need to know.
Sophie Hannah
#50. Steve Mosby has become one of a handful of writers who make me excited about crime fiction.
Val McDermid
#51. The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards, and if you think about it, it's the only one that's given for an entire continent.
Adrian McKinty
#52. I don't write crime fiction. I write romances between fucked up people that happen to be active criminals.
Astrid 'Artistikem' Cruz
#53. Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.
Denise Mina
#54. I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.
Denise Mina
#55. Ian Rankin's Rebus is the king of modern British crime fiction. He is dour, determined, and constantly falls foul of his seniors. For all this, we root for him. He is eminently loveable, a quixotic hero moving through the darker half of a Jekyll and Hyde Edinburgh.
Mark Billingham
#56. The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.
George Pelecanos
#57. People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.
Denise Mina
#58. I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.
Karin Slaughter
#59. I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.
Emilia Fox
#60. Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.
Sophie Hannah
#61. The mainstream has lost its way. Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it's about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in.
Michael Dibdin
#62. I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it.
Isaac Hempstead-Wright
#63. The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.
At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves
Mike Bartos
#64. Flowers are fragile and ephemeral ... Even if you meant to protect them with a surrounding fence from wind and rain, they would die without sunlight ... and a spindly fence has no power against a strong wind. - Haibara Ai
Gosho Aoyama
#65. Ah, relationships. If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one.
Poppy Z. Brite
#66. Dear God, please help me to be the kind of person who my dogs think I am.
Jerrie Brock
#67. Life, like that water droplet, is everlasting and imperishable. There is only a transition, never an end !
Rajib Mukherjee
#68. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid I'll never get a chance to live!
A.A. Bell
#69. Sometimes there's just no justice. The bad guys do live, if not happily ever after, then certainly conspicuously.
Ken Bruen
#70. What most people see is a badge, behind and beyond the badge is what they need to know...the person.
Donna Brown
#71. She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.
Richard Stark
#72. I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.
Catherine Astolfo
#73. Every happy moments looks perfect till it gets messy
Sheeja Jose
#74. Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.
Jim Thompson
#75. February 9th was HIS day. The day he always striked.
Mary Papas
#76. Finia glanced towards her bedroom, wishing the darkness would swallow her whole.
Yawatta Hosby
#77. Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.
Martin Hopkins
#78. Now, this was a combination that she wouldn't dare to dream of, even in her worst nightmare.
B. Barmanbek
#79. The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.
Henry Mosquera
#80. Nothing in the world tasted as good for breakfast as stolen rolls with some butter and jam and a mug of milky coffee. Nothing tasted better than a venial sin.
Ian Rankin
#81. Foreign food isn't really my thing. I tasted whale once, and I was sick for a week.
Steen Langstrup
#82. They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction, it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.
Bruce Boxleitner
#83. It was one of those late summer days trying its best to convince everyone that winter would never seep through and ravage the earth.
A.J. Waines
#84. Blood doesn't speak of its owner.
Mita Jain
#85. I felt a little bad about killing the man, but what choice did I have?" ... Louie Morelli, "The Prince of Mafia Princes.
Patricia Bellomo
#86. You can only rise so far by climbing on others' shoulders, you know.
B. Barmanbek
#87. There are criminals everywhere these days, you know. One might end up missing the police! Who would have thought that possible?
The Maid
The Informer by Steen Langtrup
Steen Langstrup
#88. If everything comes in your way just the way you wanted them to ,then you're probably in the wrong lane.
ARKOPAUL
#89. For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction.
James Patrick Kelly
#90. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I
Harlan Ellison
#91. This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.
Mark Zero
#92. I will only write the novel, if I can solve the crime
Andrew Hixson
#93. Either I've got a wart on my nose they find curious, or I've grown a tail, Albie Merani muttered to himself. Just then he thought. I'd better get a move on, got work to do. He hurried across to some stairs, heading down deeper into station, then followed the signs to the pod station.
R.W. Rivers
#94. There are times when you have to commit a crime to prevent an even bigger one. At least, that's what I tell myself when I can't sleep at night.
Judy Penz Sheluk
#95. You gotta help me get out of here! They're trying to kill me. I'm gonna die. I've got $35,000 missing. Those two women took it. They're trying to kill me. You gotta help me. Cut me loose! Cut me loose!
Jeannie Walker
#96. 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
#97. Its aura distorts hard edges. Shimmering vortices of discoloration boil off, swirling, licking the
cold night air with bright spectral fire. Violence and death, this one's still hot.
Michael Allan Scott
#98. Moriston House is really quite beautiful. No wonder everyone wants to be murdered here.
--Roberta "Bobbie" Aldridge
Jennifer A. Girardin
#99. the influence of organised crime reaches into the economy, our politics and everyday life- dongri to dubai
S. Hussain Zaidi
#100. Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only fiction, only entertainment."
Richard Dawkins
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