Best Detectives Quotes

I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I’ve chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context – Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario.

A lot of the appeal of internal medicine is Sherlockian—solving the case from the clues. We are detectives; we revel in the process of figuring it all out. It’s what doctors most love to do.

I think that is one of the things that is beautiful about fiction and that you can do through drama. If I was a detective, I could make a certain version of everything we know to be exactly true. And that would have a certain kind of truth value. And there are certain other things that we know that are emotionally true.

There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

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

Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective.

the detective’s highest talent lay in the gentle art of seeking favours under the guise of conferring them!

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Spinach and champagne. Going back to the kitchens at the old Waldorf. Dancing on the kitchen tables, wearing the chef’s headgear. Finally, a crash and being escorted out by the house detectives.

Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

I wanted to play a TV detective because it’s a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven’t done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.

Then there are some minor points that strike me as suggestive – for instance, the position of Mrs. Hubbard’s sponge bag, the name of Mrs. Armstrong’s mother, the detective methods of Mr. Hardman, the suggestion of Mr. MacQueen that Ratchett himself destroyed the charred note we found, Princess Dragomiroff’s Christian name, and a grease spot on a Hungarian passport.

I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.

As an actor, I’ve learned to become a detective. You have to figure out who that person is. If the character is a thief, you have to figure out what makes them a thief. Whatever the prevailing idiosyncrasy is, I have to find it in the script.

Bosh. I find a rival – but no, I won’t flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner – I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you.

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.

You can always tell a detective on TV. He never takes his hat off.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

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.

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

A really good detective never gets married.

Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that’s why they’re still the best ones.

To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.

If I’m home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.

I love soap operas – the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives – Jessica Fletcher, ‘Columbo,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘L.A. Law.’ Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program – a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.

Well I think that the mind of a serial killer and the mind of the detectives represent the duality we face as people.

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

How different from the cosy world of Rüya’s detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.

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.

One of the things I have an allergic reaction to playing, especially as a black actor, is the mandatory kind of best friend/cop/detective type. You will never see me in that movie.

If you think about it, the historian’s task is like that of the detective.

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!