Best Detective Stories Quotes

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

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

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

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.

I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural.

Detective stories are the art-for-art’s sake of yawning Philistinism.

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

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.

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.

make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression.

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.

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.

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.

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.

American violence is public life, it’s a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

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.

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].

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.

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.

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.

Where there’s a will there’s a detective story.

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.

Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it.Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.The only place success comes before work is a dictionaryPoliticians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

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.

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

I love facts and figures. It’s like following a detective story, piecing together what’s going on in the economy.