Detective Quotes

Detective Quote of the day

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.

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

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.

A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week.

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

Anything is easy to the man who sees.... The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised.

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

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.

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

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

Chuckling to herself, Nancy said aloud, "Romance and detective work won't mix tonight!

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

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

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.

At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.

He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?

I like a good murder that can't be found out. That is, of course it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

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.

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 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].

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.

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.

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

I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.

I guess us folks in California are kind of straitlaced and old-fashioned."Hahaha, I thought on the way downstairs. I never thought I'd say those words with a straight face...

A woman could do a lot of crazy things for a pair of fine-looking dimples.

I was between them, and as the tension sparked, I felt like a small rodent trapped between mastodons.

There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.

Moriston House is really quite beautiful. No wonder everyone wants to be murdered here.--Roberta "Bobbie" Aldridge

I hate unbreakable alibis--they are usually the first to crack. --Hugo Anstead

The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to bethese days, when I got this call. I could hear the rainbattering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang.

Conan Doyle deluded a century of readers into thinking we're all deductive geniuses.

If Hori were to die, I should not forget! Hori is a song in my heart for ever... That means-that there is no more death...

Chatty, defensive, observant. My new favorite witness.

The criminal mind is perverted and convoluted but almost invariably unimaginative, 'he said as Molly came out in a fluster

When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.

We don't know how our choices can change the course of our lives until they do. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes tragedy for us to realize it.

The instant Isabella Cortez left the safety of the FBI building, goose bumps skittered across her skin and her senses went on high alert.

Blood always excites me.

Everything can be summed up into an equation.

Persistence is often a detective's greatest ally.

If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water.

I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they're caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

Ah ha!' the Doc screeched suddenly, wheeling around. ''The salicylic acid! Maybe it SHOULD have been heated first!