Detective Quotes - page 6

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight. (Jonathan Winters)
Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the Secret Annexe. The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. View quote
Anne Frank
The detective embodies, even more than the romantic drifter, rationality; this intriguing and apparent dichotomy pertains to a significant part of Bengali children's literature as well – that ofen, especially in the proliferation of adventure, spy and mystery genres in Bengali in the first half of the twentieth century, children's literature is not so much an escape from the humanist logos of ‘high' literary practice, but a coming to its irreducible possibilities from a different direction. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
Colly doing a good, no-frills, manful job for England here, just one from the over. He is to cricket what Jim Taggart is to detective work. View quote
Ben Dirs
The Compleat Angler is acknowledged to be one of the world's books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn't read its books, it borrows a detective story instead. View quote
Stephen Leacock
It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all. I like 'Detective Frost.' View quote
Patti Smith
When I was young, I knew William Burroughs really well. And William's secret desire, which he never quite did, was to write a straightforward detective novel. View quote
Patti Smith
"Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture...They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)...also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."...in American poetry...Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel.... There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16). View quote
Dana Gioia
The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds. View quote
Philip Guedalla
To say that basic science is exciting may sound like a contradiction... But I would remind you that there are two intellectual excitements that are not tame at all and that we remember all our lives. One is the thrill of following out a chain of reasoning for yourself; the other is the pleasure of watching several strongly individualistic personalities argue about their deepest convictions. That is to say, the thrill of a detective story and the pleasure of watching a play by George Bernard Shaw. View quote
John R. Platt
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 have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude. (S. S. Van Dine)
These detective series on TV always end at precisely the right moment-after the criminal is arrested and before the court turns him loose. View quote
Robert Orben
Jim's sigh was soft, gentle. It would have been less devastating if she hadn't heard the despair under it. "Detective Miller once told me, ‘We don't have a right thing, just a plateful of a little less wrong.'” "Yeah, but he was an asshole.”. View quote
Daniel Abraham
Make no mistake, there's formula detective fiction, there's formula science fiction...but there's formula literary fiction too. It's genre snobbery that we're only ready to acclaim stuff that's of the genre but different in some way. It's sci-fi but, it's fantasy but... I didn't want to write a but. View quote
Marlon James
[Detective McBeth] "Being out of the closet is a luxury that many gay people can't afford. Maybe you can't understand that, but it's something I think about." View quote
Michael Nava
One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic - hardware and technology - to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later. View quote
Arthur C. Clarke