Detective Stories Quotes

I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning. ~ Raymond Chandler

Lady Sylvia McCordle: Mr Weissman
Tell us about the film you're going to make.
Morris Weissman: Oh, sure. It's called "Charlie Chan In London". It's a detective story.
Mabel Nesbitt: Set in London?
Morris Weissman: Well, not really. Most of it takes place at a shooting party in a country house. Sort of like this one, actually. Murder in the middle of the night, a lot of guests for the weekend, everyone's a suspect. You know, that sort of thing.
Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it?
Morris Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you.
Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it. ~ Julian Fellowes

Do you mean to tell me, Superintendent, that this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room by some apparently supernatural agency. ~ Agatha Christie

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

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

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

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

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting! ~ Marie Windsor

Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society's economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The "ideological superstructure" of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

You're suggesting the mysterious X. Where do we look for him?'

Poirot said:

'Obviously in a close circle. There were five people, were there not, whocould have been concerned?'

'Five? Let me see. There was the old duffer who messed about with his herb brewing. A dangerous hobby-but an amiable creature. Vague sort of person. Don't see him as X. There was the girl-she might have polished off Caroline, but certainly not Amyas. Then there was the stockbroker-Crale's best friend. That's popular in detective stories, but I don't believe in it in real life. There's no one else-oh yes, the kid sister, but one doesn't seriously consider her. That's four.'

Hercule Poirot said:

'You forget the governess.'

'Yes, that's true. Wretched people, governesses, one never does remember them. I do recall her dimly though. Middle-aged, plain, competent. I suppose a psychologist would say that she had a guilty passion for Crale and therefore killed him. The repressed spinster! It's no good-I just don't believe it. As far as my dim remembrance goes she wasn't the neurotic type.'

'It is a long time ago.'

'Fifteen or sixteen years, I suppose. Yes, quite that. You can't expect my memories of the case to be very acute. ~ Agatha Christie

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [ ... ] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible. ~ T. S. Eliot

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

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

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

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

The perplexity of life arises from their being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call it's triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional
to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. ~ Kate Summerscale

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

Both Tom and I adore detective stories. Isn't that so, Tom?" [Lady Brace]
"Right!" agreed her husband ... "But they've got to be proper detective stories. They've got to present a tricky, highly sophisticated problem, which you're given fair opportunity to solve."
"And," amplified Virginia, "no saying they're psychological studies when the author can't write for beans."
"Correct!" her husband agreed again. "Couldn't care less when you're supposed to get all excited as to whether the innocent man will be hanged or the innocent heroine will be seduced. Heroine ought to be seduced; what's she there for? The thing is the mystery. It's not worth reading if the mystery is simple or easy or no mystery at all. ~ Carter Dickson

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game. ~ Rex Stout

Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories. ~ Elizabeth Savage

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

There's a structure to a detective story that I can easily understand. I understand playing that particular game. It's like solving a puzzle. Or creating a puzzle. ~ Christopher Bollen

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

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

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) ~ W. H. Auden

This seems to have taken me a long way from detective stories, but explains, perhaps, why I have got more interest in my victims than my criminals. The more passionately alive the victim, the more glorious indignation I have on his behalf, and am full of a delighted triumph when I have delivered a near-victim out of the valley of the shadow of death. Returning ~ Agatha Christie

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

Make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Boredom has been used as a technique, it is a device. In Zen, boredom is used as a device: you are bored to death, and you are not allowed to escape. You are not to go outside, you are not to entertain yourself, you are not to do, you are not to talk, you are not to read novels and detective stories. No thrill. No possibility to escape anywhere. ~ Rajneesh

I don't think it's healthy for a man to be always brooding over crime and detective stories, reading up all sorts of cases. It puts ideas into his head. ~ Agatha Christie

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it. ~ Dashiell Hammett

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

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

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism. ~ V.S. Pritchett

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

Style, you either have it or you don't, and if you have it, you have it all the time. ~ David Biagini

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

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing. ~ Raymond Chandler

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils. ~ Stephen King

Where there's a will there's a detective story. ~ Carolyn Wells

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories. ~ Ruth Rendell

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor - by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
"He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.
"The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. ~ Raymond Chandler

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories. ~ Jeffery Deaver

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average
or only slightly above average
detective story does ... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way. ~ Raymond Chandler

A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive. ~ G.K. Chesterton

When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough. ~ Carolyn Wells

It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of "Baywatch." So I began retelling Beowulf as a futuristic episode of "Baywatch" for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do. Look, I don't give you grief over where you get your ideas from. ~ Neil Gaiman

Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter. ~ Agatha Christie

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible. That means that the writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true ... and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you. ~ Frederik Pohl

Our stories must be written, shared and communicated. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Even the adults were charming, traditional Barue, who readily shared kitchen stories with him over mugs of Swigny. ~ Suresh Guptara

I just told them that dear Uncle Silas has gone away on a long journey," she said. "They're such mites, you know, and I've never let them hear about Death, or have ugly toys or stories about ogres and things. I mean, I do frightfully believe in keeping their little minds free from everything but happy, beautiful things, don't you? ~ Georgette Heyer

It's no surprise that small romances began to bubble up throughout the lab. At the time, it seemed to make sense. It wasn't long before our working together in such close proximity, together with the general excitement of the task at hand, led to lingering glances over calorimeters, colleagues leaning in to share the dual eyepieces on comparison microscopes, the sudden, accidental brush of hands simultaneously attempting to adjust the needle valves of Bunsen burners. When we examined some of the pollen we found in Loeka's colon, it turned out the cells within the pollen were still intact, which meant that Loeka's death could be placed sometime during the spring. Spring! ~ Seth Fried

Many strong girls have similar stories: They were socially isolated and lonely in adolescence. Smart girls are often the girls most rejected by peers. Their strength is a threat and they are punished for being different. Girls who are unattractive or who don't worry about their appearance are scorned. This isolation is often a blessing because it allows girls to develop a strong sense of self. Girls who are isolated emerge from adolescence more independent and self-sufficient than girls who have been accepted by others.
Strong girls may protect themselves by being quiet and guarded so that their rebellion is known by only a few trusted others. They may be cranky and irascible and keep critics at a distance so that only people who love them know what they are up to. They may have the knack of shrugging off the opinions of others or they may use humor to deflect the hostility that comes their way. ~ Mary Pipher

The dead still come to me every now and then. But the lulls between are getting smaller. They are finding me somehow. I tell them why they can't move on. I listen to their lives and talk to them if they need it. I still draw their portraits in my sketchbook, with their stories. I put Mary Summer in there too. Someone should remember. ~ B.L. Brunnemer

I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book. ~ Sally Kirkland

No subject is more touched on than love, in the human life stories as well as in the literary corpus they have left us ... No subject, either, is as discussed, as controversial, especially during the final period of human history, when the cyclothymic fluctuations concerning the belief in love became constant and dizzying. In conclusion, no subject seems to have preoccupied man as much; even money, even the satisfaction derived from combat and glory, loses by comparison, its dramatic power in human life stories. Love seems to have been, for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible, the regret and the grace, the focal point upon which all suffering and joy could be concentrated. ~ Michel Houellebecq

long stories in the same series (as well as a couple of stabs at mainstream stories). ~ Orson Scott Card

Fantasy writing must be grounded in both truth and life experience if it is to work. It can be as inventive and creative as the writer can make it, a whirlwind of images and plot twists, but it cannot be built on a foundation of air. The world must be identifiable with our own, must offer us a frame of reference we can recognize."
"Fantasy stories work because the writer has interwoven bits and pieces of reality with imagination to form a personal vision. ~ Terry Brooks

Fiction isn't bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can't play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can't enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But stories are just tools. They shouldn't become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars `to make a lot of money for the cooperation' or 'to protect the national interest'. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our life in their service. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I love stories where the impossible appears believable, plausible and real. Maybe it's silly, but it's one of the reasons Michael Crichton's writing always appealed to me: he took outlandish ideas and made them seem completely within the realm of possibility. I remember reading "Jurassic Park" and feeling like: "Oh, yeah
no, that's totally happening right now. They're bringing back dinosaurs! ~ J.J. Abrams

She asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri ... ~ James Joyce

Because here's the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be. ~ Steven Brust

And then what did you do, Lord Oliver? Karl's eight-year-old daughter gazed up at him in awe, as though this were the best story she had ever heard. ~ Jessica Day George

Anybody that wants to walk out that door and leave home for a few months and rely on themselves instead of fate might have some interesting stories to tell. ~ Garrett Hedlund

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we us ~ Robert Macfarlane

The story of a mother's life: Trapped between a scream and a hug. ~ Cathy Guisewite

We are to give up all our sins, big or small, for the Father's reward of eternal life. We are to forget self-justifying stories, excuses, rationalizations, defense mechanisms, procrastinations, appearances, personal pride, judgmental thoughts, and doing things our way. We are to separate ourselves from all worldliness and take upon us the image of God in our countenances. ~ Robert C. Gay

I love the French detective series 'Spiral.' It's quite brutal to watch, but I'm already hooked. ~ Robert Winston

Now on the other hand, if someone is selling a product, opening a dance studio, or has some other aim to help themselves, then I tend to look askance at some of these strange stories from outer space. ~ Robert Stack

The story of your life is really the story of the relations between yourself and God. ~ Emmet Fox

Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams; both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup. ~ Lore Segal

I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on 'This American Life,' since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It's really hard to get stuff on that show. ~ Mike Birbiglia

Did Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews furnish structural material for Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon? It has been pointed out in these pages that there are many things in the former book that might well have suggested many major things in the other.Not a few things merely, one or two, or half dozen, but many; and it is this fact of many things of similarity and the cumulative force of them that makes them so serious a menace to Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon's origin ~ B. H. Roberts

One of the most powerful shocks of the Middle Passage is the collapse of our tacit contract with the universe–the assumption that if we act correctly, if we are of good heart and good intentions, things will work out. We assume a reciprocity with the universe. If we do our part, the universe will comply. Many ancient stories, including the Book of Job, painfully reveal the fact that there is no such contract, and everyone who goes through the Middle Passage is made aware of it. ~ James Hollis

Your favorite story, whatever it might be, was written for one reader ~ Victor Levin

The task ahead of you is never as great as the power within you. ~ Fran 'Mystiblu' Hafey

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

But I'm collecting the story of his life. The real story.' Chronicler made a helpless gesture. 'Without the dark parts it's just some silly f - ' Chronicler froze halfway through the word, eyes darting nervously to the side.
Bast grinned like a child catching a priest midcurse. 'Go on,' he urged, his eyes were delighted, and hard, and terrible. 'Say it.'
Like some silly faerie story,' Chronicler finished, his voice thin and pale as paper.
Bast smiled a wide smile. 'You know nothing of the Fae, if you think our stories lack their darker sides. But all that aside, this is a faerie story, because you are gathering it for me. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Of all the stories I have read about heroes, and all that I could ever read, of one thing I'm certain-he is mine. ~ Camron Wright

I raise an eyebrow, working to achieve the right tone of intellectual superiority. If you've never read the Twilight books or the Hunger Games series you wouldn't understand. Not. One. Bit. They are complex stories. Big words. Probably beyond you. ~ Anne Eliot

I truly believe in the value that stories have in being able to elevate humanity and make the world a better place. ~ Stephanie Allain

I could have just said I'm good at my job, but I didn't. Didn't want the police thinking I was holding out information when I wasn't. I've got one advantage over a normal homicide detective, I expect it to be a monster. No one ever calls me in if it's just a stabbing, or a hit-and-run. I don't spend a lot of time trying to come up with nice, normal explanations. It means I get to ignore a lot of theories. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

For a teller of tales will never die, but will live on in stories - for as long as there are folk to listen. ~ Joanne Harris

Tell your story with your whole heart. ~ Brene Brown

I love to tell stories and I love to work with directors and I think I write really visually, which I think directors like, and I love making movies, so I found something that I'm good at and I'm really happy doing. ~ John Orloff

I'd love to be able to play all different roles, whether it's Maureen in Rent or Maria in West Side Story. I would just love to be involved in this business forever. ~ Lea Michele

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper. ~ William Kennedy

David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them. ~ John Connolly

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone. ~ Orson Scott Card

I just think, as a species, what we [people] enjoy most is creation and creativity, and telling stories is an extension of expressing all the thoughts and ideas that we have inside of ourselves. ~ Seth Gabel

An interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain [our] humanity and tell some amazing stories. ~ Aaron Koblin

The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it. ~ Byron Katie

In comparison with all this, our little stories of achievement seem pitiful; Too well we know what bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world! ~ Joseph Campbell

On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story. ~ Simon Conway Morris

She knew breaking up with Ethan was going to be a full-time job because being in a relationship with him had also been a full-time job. ~ Richard Finney