Books Quote by Rex Stout

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

— Anonymous

Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath…

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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

— Michael Connelly

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories…

— Nic Pizzolatto

A detective story is just the premise for conflict, as a Western is.

— Lorne Greene

I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're…

— Laura van den Berg

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

— P. D. James

A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations. Such matters…

— S. S. Van Dine

The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters.

— Shane Black

Crime makes for great drama and it's interesting because it delves into the darker side of us. Those kind of stories go way back,…

— Mark Bonnar

Occasionally, I have written about stories related to crime, but I have never attempted a traditional detective story. So I want to write a…

— Ruskin Bond

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day…

— James Patterson