Best Detective Fiction Quotes

I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

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.

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.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

It’s a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

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