Detectives Quotes · Page 2

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

— Carolyn Wells

I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity, it is certainly beyond me.

— Arthur Conan Doyle

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

— P. D. James

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

— Ben H. Winters

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

— Anonymous

I know who I am. And after all these years, there's a victory in that.

— Matthew McConaughey

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

— Giles Foden

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Paul Guilfoyle

I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a…

— Mary Lavin

Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along.

— Dean Koontz

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

— John Sandford

Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science…

— Thomas Jane

I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.

— Walter Mosley

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

— Agatha Christie

I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life…

— Stephen Hopkins

If anybody asks me what I attribute the longevity of my career to, then I say it's because I was never satisfied…

— Clint Eastwood

If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board…

— Rex Stout

In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a…

— Victor Davis Hanson

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be…

— Carl Jung

Anything is easy to the man who sees… The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective…

— Samuel Hopkins Adams

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…

— Michelle Monaghan

Ned said "Nancy Drew is the best girl detective in the whole world!" "Don't you believe him," Nancy said quickly. "I have…

— Carolyn Keene

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the…

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during…

— Sam Shepard

Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van,…

— Alexander McCall Smith

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain…

— Raymond Chandler

I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective…

— Ian Rankin

Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what…

— Tom Verlaine

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get…

— Raymond Chandler

Detectives are only human; we're not Gods that know everything. When detectives tell their theory, in reality, most are rather anxious. Thinking…

— Gosho Aoyama

Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit…

— Raymond Chandler

I like the idea of playing a historical detective.

— Eva Mendes

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

— Philip Guedalla

I'd love to do a Columbo-type detective character in a series.

— Robert Carlyle

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

— Anonymous

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to…

— Raymond Chandler

Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first…

— Rex Stout

Andrea raised her eyebrows. "Look at you, all high-speed." "Yeah, you'd think I was a detective or something." Andrea held her hand…

— Ilona Andrews

The problem facing a comprehender is analogous to the problem that a detective faces when trying to solve a crime. In both…

— David Rumelhart