Quotes About Detective Stories

#1. To me, detective stories are a great solace, a sort of mental knitting, where it doesn't matter if you drop a stitch."

[From a letter to George Lyttelton]

Rupert Hart-Davis

#2. Like all really nice people, you have a weakness for detective stories, and feel that there are not enough of them. So, after all that you have done for me, the least that I can do for you is to write you one.

A.A. Milne

#3. Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

Dashiell Hammett

#4. Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.

Sergio Aragones

#5. I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.

Elizabeth Kostova

#6. I also wonder why is it that so many of the movies and books that are detective stories are also the most aesthetically interesting? From Hollywood noirs to horror movies like The Shining [1980].

Christopher Bollen

#7. I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside.

Stieg Larsson

#8. There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living - cook books and detective stories.

Rex Stout

#9. Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

V.S. Pritchett

#10. Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories.

Elizabeth Savage

#11. As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

Rex Stout

#12. She sat in a corner warm with sunlight, a copy of Home Notes open unread upon her knee, and watched the green meadows flying past while the business men in the carriage talked about news in the papers - awful, as usual - their golf, their gardeners, and the detective stories they were reading.

Stella Gibbons

#13. You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

Agatha Christie

#14. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific.

George Orwell

#15. Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

Jeffery Deaver

#16. I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#17. Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

W. H. Auden

#18. 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.

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Detective stories are mostly bunkum ... But they amuse people ... And they're useful sometimes.

Agatha Christie

#22. I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.

Ruth Rendell

#23. In detective stories ... I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but ... there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild.

Bertrand Russell

#24. From what I've read of detective stories, inspectors always do want to drag the pond first.

A.A. Milne

#25. Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

Stieg Larsson

#26. It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity.

G.K. Chesterton

#27. In detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have

Dorothy L. Sayers

#28. 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

#29. I don't think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story.

Mary Lavin

#30. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Arthur C. Clarke

#31. Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving.

Gertrude Stein

#32. I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

Marie Windsor

#33. The thing I don't like about detective stories is looking for criminals.

Natsuo Kirino

#34. Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter.

Agatha Christie

#35. I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning.

Raymond Chandler

#36. Where there's a will there's a detective story.

Carolyn Wells

#37. The final two issues of the Englehart/Rogers/Austin collaboration, Detective Comics #475 and #476, are now esteemed alongside the greatest Batman stories ever created and would provide the seed for Tim Burton's 1989 feature film. In

Glen Weldon

#38. 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

#39. A three-pint problem

Melvyn Small

#40. If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Nic Pizzolatto

#41. Don't wanna ever take your shoes off in coconut land. Never know when you're gonna have to run.

Dianne Harman

#42. If we were all as wise as we should be, we would have no stories to tell

Freeman Wills Croft

#43. The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

Carl Jung

#44. The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

Philip Guedalla

#45. We tell stories of other people's marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. Be can we tell the story of our own. If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.

Adam Ross

#46. The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world's books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn't read its books, it borrows a detective story instead.

Stephen Leacock

#47. You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle.

Christopher Bollen

#48. I once started a detective story to make money-but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!

Mary McCarthy

#49. I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.

Agatha Christie

#50. I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life kind of a detective story.

Stephen Hopkins