Quotes About Detective Work

#1. Research. Government archives. Detective work. Few lucky guesses. Easy.

Douglas Adams

#2. They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#3. Detective work is neither a happy nor a satisfying business, Miss Rook," said Jackaby, settling in as the amber buildings sailed past our window. "Marlowe will understand." "I don't understand at all." Commissioner Marlowe kept his voice low and even as we sat across from him the following morning.

William Ritter

#4. Chuckling to herself, Nancy said aloud, Romance and detective work won't mix tonight!

Carolyn Keene

#5. I'd been trained in the art of psychotherapy, the excavation of the past as a means of untangling the present and rendering it livable. It's detective work, of sorts, crouching stealthily in the blind alleys of the unconscious. (179)

Jonathan Kellerman

#6. You just work really hard and scrutinize. What is it called in politics? "Opposition research"? You want to do the detective work on your client so to speak before your opponent can dig it up. We're vetting everything thoroughly.

James Ponsoldt

#7. Anything is easy to the man who sees ... The open eye of the open mind
that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised.

Samuel Hopkins Adams

#8. If you do not know your purpose, you have detective work to do. The clues will be in your life to date, in the things you are good at, the things you enjoy doing, in your dreams and your daydreams.

Bill Harvey

#9. If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.

Catherine Aird

#10. As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

Nick Harkaway

#11. The first time we met I told you I was a detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at it, lady. I don't play at it.

Raymond Chandler

#12. The case called for plain, old-fashioned police leg work!

Donald J. Sobol

#13. From Chapter 1:
The main rub was the lack of RnR and I burned out. Three years and three stripes later, I ejected from the MP Corps, vowing I'd never do police or criminal investigative work again. Instead, I returned home when I should've learned better.

Ed Lynskey

#14. It was the first time I worked with Matthew McConaughey [in the True Detective].They're fun guys [with Woody Harrelson]. They don't take life at all too seriously, but yet they take their work very seriously. And both of them are just so committed to character and the story.

Michelle Monaghan

#15. The only way Magick ever has power is when its secrets are truly secret. Once too many people know how it works, then it doesn't work anymore.

Abramelin Keldor

#16. I wanted to be a police detective. In my work, particularly in documentaries, I am obsessed with finding things out, seeking ever-new facts and perspectives - each project can involve years of research.

James Marsh

#17. I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.

Errol Morris

#18. When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.

Mary Lee Settle

#19. The detective had been watching the video of Julie Mao's fight with her captors over and over again while they'd waited on Naomi and Amos to finish their work. It gave Holden the disquieting feeling that Miller was storing the footage in his head. Fuel for something he planned to do later.

James S.A. Corey

#20. Hard work is great. It buys you more tickets to the luck lottery.

Steven David Levine

#21. I know he is
sensitive
on some points, Detective, but you must bear in mind how hard it is for an honest man to do his work in relative obscurity, while dishonest men attain wealth and renown. That is why corruption is so pernicious. It breaks the will of good men.

Jed Rubenfeld

#22. Most investigators don't even know what the word means. You stop the cops from using informants and the only crimes they'd ever solve would be those by deranged postal workers who come to work once too often.

Andrew Vachss

#23. I'm an angel of death. I don't need night school, woman. You should just give up on this detective shit and start killing people for a living. It's simple, honest work, and you ain't got the brains for anything else.

Ilona Andrews

#24. I don't see anything," Miller said. "What's it look like?"
"The eye of an angry God?" Elvi said.
"Oh," Miller said. The heavy plates of his robotic body clicked and hissed against each other as he shifted. "Yeah, well that's probably it, then. Good work.

James S.A. Corey

#25. We are all doomed, Yankee detective. One day I will come into work and see myself lying on this slab.

Carroll Bryant

#26. The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

Michael Connelly

#27. It takes a certain kind of man willing to work long, grueling hours in a career offering few rewards.

Jon Michaelsen

#28. I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.

Shirley Jackson

#29. An alibi is only as good as its details.

Kenneth Eade

#30. 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

#31. A good detective not only has to be intelligent, persevering and prepared to do enless boring routine work, he also needs one other quality: Intuition. I see it rather as the ability to make connections which are there but are not immediately apparent. Subterranean connections.

Dorothy Simpson

#32. 'True Detective' is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That's what we shoot for.

Nic Pizzolatto

#33. Now the tea began to do its work- as it always did- and the world that only a few minutes previously had seemed so bleak started to seem less so.

Alexander McCall Smith