Detective Quotes

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

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

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.

I saw part of The Singing Detective on TV in New York. I said, Something is going on here.

If your neighbors think you're a detective because a cop always brings you home, you might be a redneck.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

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.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

I play a detective, very close to myself actually.

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

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

A really good detective never gets married.

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

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.

There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.

While I was in jail, they handcuffed me and took me to a backroom, where a detective from the FBI and a Secret Service agent were, and they interrogated me for about three or four hours.

I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world. I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then.

Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.

In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.

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.

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.

I think like a detective.

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.

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

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

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural.

I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.