Top 78 Quotes About Detective Fiction
#1. My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.
Sue Grafton
#2. Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.
Tyler Cowen
#3. It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.
Ira Glass
#4. Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.
Giles Foden
#5. It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all. I like 'Detective Frost.'
Patti Smith
#6. I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.
Robert Crais
#7. I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#8. On romance books: We might assume then that men, major consumers of thrillers, westerns, and detective fiction, enjoy being beaten up, tortured, shot, stabbed dragged by galloping horses, and thrown out of moving vehicles.
Daphne Clair
#9. In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.
Michael Dirda
#10. Forgive me if I am not filled with enthusiasm for the new golden age," he said.
Alex Lamb
#11. If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.
Albert Brooks
#12. People responded to body language without even thinking. It was important to get it absolutely right.
Sara Sheridan
#13. 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.
(Letter, April 19, 1951)
Raymond Chandler
#14. Faith doesn't move mountains, Detective. It just obscures the view.
Corey Redekop
#15. I couldn't stop staring.
"Sweetheart," he said, "is my slip showing or something?
Shelly Reuben
#16. That was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity.
Lily Gardner
#17. Suddenly the images in the center of the room became more than images. They solidified.
Stephanie Osborn
#18. He never had been good at arguing with women; they tapped into pools of resentment over slights that had steeped for years.
Martin Cruz Smith
#19. Rebus drank his coffee and felt his head spin. He was feeling like the detective in a cheap thriller, and wished that he could turn to the last page and stop all his confusion, all the death and the madness and the spinning in his ears.
Ian Rankin
#20. Florence Dempsey, played by Torchy Blane actress Glenda Farrell, goes so far as to memorably declare to her friend Charlotte in The Mystery of the Wax Museum, "You raise the kids; I'll raise the roof!
Erika Janik
#21. I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes
Lauren Bradshaw
#22. That's just where I must part company with you, Inspector," said the Vicar with a gentle smile. "I'm rather a voracious reader of mystery stories, and it's always struck me that the detective in fiction is inclined to underrate the value of intuition.
John Bude
#23. My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear ("Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!") signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there'd be real hell to pay.
Ed Lynskey
#25. Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.
B.V. Lawson
#26. I hate unbreakable alibis--they are usually the first to crack.
--Hugo Anstead
Jennifer A. Girardin
#27. 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
#28. He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.
B.V. Lawson
#29. 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
#30. Al Hickey: It's not about anything.
Frank Boggs: Yeah, it's about four hundred grand
Phillip Rock
#31. I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning.
Raymond Chandler
#32. Watson fully comprehended the fact that occasionally it is useful for one's adversaries to underestimate one's abilities."
~Sherlock Holmes
Stephanie Osborn
#33. [ ... ] a super-rat. I nailed it across the eyes once with a lucky shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone.
Warren Ellis
#34. About Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them.
Lily Gardner
#35. Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science fiction show, I'm all in, in that regard.
Thomas Jane
#36. When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write above the level of his own eyes.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#37. There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn't one of those. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.
Lily Gardner
#38. He smiled again. I kept staring. Then I said, "My name is Tillary Quilter."
"You called. We have an appointment. I'm a trained investigator, so I figured that one out.
Shelly Reuben
#39. I am the prosecutor. I represent the state. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. Together you will weigh this evidence. You will deliberate upon it. You will decide if it proves the defendant's guilt.
Scott Turow
#40. In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.
Joe Meno
#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. Al Hickey: [following the final shootout] Nobody came ... nobody cares. It's still not about anything.
Frank Boggs: Yeah, you told me.
Phillip Rock
#43. I stood there alone in the eerily silent streets of Las Vegas and listened to my penis cry.
Warren Ellis
#44. Moriston House is really quite beautiful. No wonder everyone wants to be murdered here.
--Roberta "Bobbie" Aldridge
Jennifer A. Girardin
#45. Even if you don't like Poe - he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century.
Donna Tartt
#46. A wise man does not always admit to everything he knows. And sometimes an overly-credulous friend can be a source of mild amusement."
~Sherlock Holmes
Stephanie Osborn
#47. In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball.
Ed Lynskey
#48. 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
#49. Walking out into the night with a water fey was all kinds of stupid. Heck, Kelpies eat people. They may not play with their food as creatively as the Each Uisge, but dead is dead.
E.J. Stevens
#50. I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
James Patterson
#51. 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
#52. The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret.
Lily Gardner
#53. Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.
Murder in the Dog Park
Jill Yesko
#54. 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
#55. Allow me to introduce myself,
the name is Brown, Jane Brown,
and I am the greatest detective the world
has ever seen. I'm known to solve multiple cases,
on any given day, without even breaking a sweat.
In fact, I am working on one now.
A.J. DeJong
#56. I will only write the novel, if I can solve the crime
Andrew Hixson
#57. If everything comes in your way just the way you wanted them to ,then you're probably in the wrong lane.
ARKOPAUL
#58. Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don't you feel it?"
I felt it. I took it easy.
Ross Macdonald
#59. Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories.
Elizabeth Savage
#60. She and I are as far apart as the stars in the sky and the soles of my feet." Detective Sean Ryan ~Deception on Sable Hill by Shelley Gray
Shelley Gray
#61. 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
#62. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Arthur C. Clarke
#63. 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
#64. When you live outside the law, you have to be flexible
Tom Cook
#65. A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
Raymond Chandler
#66. Your blood reveal your most intimate secrets. Are you dying of leukimia or AIDS? Did you smoke cigarette or drink a glass of wine in the last few hours? Are you prozac because you're depressed, or Viagra because you can't get it up?
Tess Gerritsen
#67. Digital Age Cozy: Cozy mystery can be more than knitting grannies, cats, and cookbooks!
A.E.H. Veenman
#68. His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with terror not dissipated but omnipresent, like God.
("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
#69. Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.
B.V. Lawson
#70. If you don't like the path your life has taken, choose another.
Robert G. DeMers
#71. She has carefully audited her life and found she has no requirement for a husband.
Helen Smith
#72. We all have something special in us, it's a matter of finding it, and knowing what to do with it.
Robert Magarian
#73. All the clues are there in front of us,hidden under a veil,we cannot get the clue by searching for,we have to search for the veil instead.
Arkopaul Das
#74. Man lives such a dull and drab life that he wants some sensation. Those who are a little wiser, they read scientific fiction or detective stories. Those who are not so wise, they read spiritual fiction.
Osho
#75. 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
#76. A detective who uses his deductive powers to corner a suspect and then does nothing to stop them from committing suicide is no better than a murderer himself. - Kudo Shinichi
Gosho Aoyama
#77. At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.
Agatha Christie
#78. I'm Detective Piper of the Fairyland Metro Police, and I've been called in to investigate the incident of the missing frog prince ...
A.F. Stewart
