Quotes About Mystery Novels

#1. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

Linwood Barclay

#2. A god who cares more about a little water on the head than my daughter's character is not a deity I want her to spend eternity with.

Sara Paretsky

#3. 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

#4. She swore she'd never turn into her P.I. father...but that was before she ran over the body.

Lida Sideris

#5. Blood doesn't speak of its owner.

Mita Jain

#6. 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

#7. If I'm going down, I'm going down with lipstick on.

Beth Yarnall

#8. The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Jesse Kellerman

#9. She had an exciting job, several good friends, her cat, her peanut M&Ms, the mystery novels she was forever reading, and - well, me.

Tom Savage

#10. Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

Natalie Goldberg

#11. Knowledge can be like the skin on the surface of the water in a pond, or it can go all the way down to the mud. It can be the tiny tip of the iceberg or the whole hundred percent.

Siobhan Dowd

#12. The morning drizzle tightened the District's notorious braided-knot commute into a noose of traffic. - Scott Drayco

B.V. Lawson

#13. I measure my days by the number of homicidal thoughts I have. I only had two today. So it must have been good.

Lida Sideris

#14. 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

#15. She was the kind of woman a person could die over or kill over.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

#16. From now on, it is our task to suspect each and everyone amongst us. Forewarned is forearmed. Take no risks and be alert to danger. That is all.

Agatha Christie

#17. It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

Anne Tyler

#18. Both men were pictures of the kind of grief that cauterizes open wounds in memory and turns them into black scars.

B.V. Lawson

#19. He was a Super Politician, defender of untruths, injustice and the American power-play.

B.V. Lawson

#20. Three guys and a girl were leaning against a black raised pickup ... I had to do a double take as this group was nothing like I had ever seen before.

Meredith T. Taylor

#21. Sometimes, we miss the truth when it's right in front of us, she thought. Sometimes the closer we are, the harder it is to see.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

#22. He had a bushy unibrow that could house a family of quail.

Lida Sideris

#23. I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.

Lisa Gardner

#24. After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.

Rodman Philbrick

#25. He's an odd duck
but he's a good kid, with a good heart.

Lisa Scottoline

#26. We're Killers On The Keyboard

Cyndi Williams Barnier

#27. But Erin let it slide. The child was only four years old; she had a whole lifetime to learn about sadness. Today was for Dalmatians, ice cream and new dolls.

Carl Hiaasen

#28. Lottie did everything the old fashioned way, including the bookkeeping, which was fine with me since I knew nothing about accounting software anyway. To me, spreadsheets was what I did on Saturday mornings after washing my bed linen.

Kate Collins

#29. We all have something special in us, it's a matter of finding it, and knowing what to do with it.

Robert Magarian

#30. He launched into the color-tsunami of Prokofiev's fourth piano sonata. It soon carried him onto a distant shore where the only thing broken was the silence.

B.V. Lawson

#31. Regretfully, he remained an alluring mystery, with fascinating lines and details she could not help but seek to examine further and memorize.

Lily Blackwood

#32. LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.

Lauren Willig

#33. My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession.

Christopher Bollen

#34. If you accomplish nothing in life... do not tell your friends... they expected it. If you accomplish success in life... find new friends,"... Redmond Herring

Redmond Herring

#35. People bring you books, cheap paperbacks, when you're in the hospital: this was how I found out that I hate mystery novels.

John Darnielle

#36. With so many people lulled into believing everything they found on the Web, he expected computer shrines to pop up in homes soon. Worship the new Oracle of Dell-phi.

B.V. Lawson

#37. Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.

B.V. Lawson

#38. I started out a human being. But pretty much had all the humanity wrung out of me after passing the Bar and practicing law for ten years. Not sure what I am now.

Jeffrey Rasley

#39. The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern.

Mickey Wyte

#40. His overactive charm poured out like a lone drainage pipe after a flash flood.

Lida Sideris

#41. The dark sky seemed to swallow the moon, as Samantha stood alone on the deserted highway.

Grace Willows

#42. 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

#43. Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.

B.V. Lawson

#44. Ghosts from the past weave spells in the present to draw a veil of secrecy over the future.

Sean Best

#45. I love mystery novels ... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.

Natasha Trethewey

#46. Well, typically the state of hypnosis is perfected at the right combination of light and sound frequency when the mind completely relaxes. At this state, the mind also becomes highly suggestible, which means the word of the hypnotist becomes the new reality of the subconscious mind.

Rajib Mukherjee

#47. There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

Peter Straub

#48. He was one of the few men who didn't aspire to be alpha as long as he was in on the hunt.

B.V. Lawson

#49. Yet, the quest for knowledge will overcome us and we must know. And, at last, we must see where the road ends, even if it be the cliff.

Nancy B. Brewer

#50. A good mystery keeps you up on Saturday night. A bad mystery puts you to sleep on Sunday afternoon. Either way, you come out ahead.

Elizabeth Jane Howard

#51. The reader is the final arbiter.

Sam Reaves

#52. The love of money can do wicked things to one's soul.

Jules Haigler

#53. She was a tornado in a skirt.

B.V. Lawson

#54. Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.

Chang-rae Lee

#55. Whenever I hear someone make a highly improbable assumption, I always ask, "What's your second choice?

Tom Haikin

#56. We just have to sort through the junk. You know, like organising a jumbled box of beads. All we have to do is put each piece in its proper place, and we'll be able to see what we have.

Janice Peacock

#57. Never much of a fantasy fan, I knew one thing for certain: Odell Greenry loved Precious every bit as much as Gollum loved his "precious." And while both objects of obsession could be possessed neither could be mastered.

Mandy Broughton

#58. [On Dashiell Hammett:] ... he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn.

Dorothy Parker

#59. At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

#60. A good friend will help you move, but a true friend will help you move a body.

Steven J. Daniels

#61. The M.E. dissected pieces of a corpse to tell a story, while Drayco tried to bring them back from the dead, jagged piece by jagged piece.

B.V. Lawson

#62. If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find.

Demetri Martin

#63. The sliver of sun turned water crystals among the coal-colored clouds into the halo of a sundog.

B.V. Lawson

#64. Durand smiles. There is nothing behind the smile except perhaps another smile, repeating ad infinitum into the distance.
'Of course,' he says.

Beatrice Hitchman

#65. I do tasks for the gods, usually things like tracking down rare items or taking someone safely to a destination.
D'Molay the Freeman Tracker

M. Scott Verne

#66. People's lives are delicate; you cannot interfere with them without running the risk of changing them profoundly. A chance remark, a careless involvement, may make the difference between a life of happiness and one of sorrow

Alexander McCall Smith

#67. Russell, the gallant knight, with sureness of spirit and the smile of the gods, was carrying the woman who raised
him into the rainy night. I was Paladin, Tristan and King David.

James Aura

#68. The part she hated most in mystery novels was where someone had a key piece of information but didn't tell anyone. That was always the precise moment that got conked on the head and thrown into a ditch. Obviously she had to tell someone, and quickly.

India Drummond

#69. Jay prepared himself to face the woman who must be at either side of emotions to be with him today - extreme hatred or extreme love.

Mita Jain

#70. It's a mistake to act as though we're not created equal.
It's another mistake not to correct the first one.
Blaming others nurtures failure.
Helping others reaps a share of their success.

L. Anthony

#71. I hope my novels will allow you to become lost in a world totally unlike the actual world we live in. I work hard to make the words evoke particular images, thoughts, feelings, the mystery of relationships.

Jay Neugeboren

#72. Creativity is a commodity and derives its value only in how energy is spent.

Mary Deal

#73. The smell of beer surrounded him in a cloud as if he'd been doused in Eau de Frat Boy cologne.

B.V. Lawson

#74. You are the master of your emotions and you and only you have the power to control them external and internal.

Sharyan Alleyne

#75. The blight of office cubes housing lawyers and lobbyists had popped up like chokeweeds in the manicured lawn of the family homestead.

B.V. Lawson

#76. story telling is not a career, it's a calling. I've been writing true and compelling news my entire professional life. My novels are packs of lies

Glen Carter

#77. Adventure novels tend to be larger than life. They involve lots of wham-bam and don't usually require a lot of extra thinking on the reader's part the way a mystery or thriller might.

Emlyn Chand

#78. What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings.

Sebastian Faulks

#79. There is no end to the things you don't understand. The mind will search for a lie to give it an answer you can understand, but one song at the right time will challenge what you accept.

Shannon L. Alder

#80. For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

John Updike

#81. Mr. Wallace, would you please repeat what you recall that this Dylan Jones chap told you. Particularly about what he claimed is needed to free up your inheritance

James Ignizio

#82. Patti Callahan Henry seamlessly combines mystery, family love, and personal journey all in one engrossing tale. From the intriguing beginning to the touching ending, The Stories We Tell is filled with the warmth, heart and compassion that have become the trademark of her novels.

Diane Chamberlain

#83. He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.

B.V. Lawson

#84. The mouse, its curiosity piqued, circled the body lying on the kitchen floor. On its second pass the inquisitive rodent paused as it reached a position about six inches from the head.

James Ignizio

#85. Westcott lived in the most perilous zone between waking and night - the shadowlands of watching and waiting, questioning and listening. He lived in the glade of remembrance." - from Who Has Known Heights

Wheston Chancellor Grove

#86. 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