Detectives Quotes - Page 7

• Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

  Raymond Chandler

  Gun, Men, Thinking

  "The Simple Art of Murder". Book by Raymond Chandler (Introduction), 1950.

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• We would never call inexplicable little insights hunches, for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

  China Mieville

  Life, Inspiration, Kissing

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• The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

  Philip Guedalla

  Mind, Normal, Noble

  Quoted in Dorothy L. Sayers, The Omnibus of Crime (1929)

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• The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man.

  Weston La Barre

  Men, Stories, Quests

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• The reality of any location in Britain being used in a TV program of a film is that something bad is going to happen! That's the nature of drama. Most of the things that get made or basically grisly detective shows about murders, accidents or medical dramas.

  Ben Wheatley

  Drama, Reality, Location

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• A detective with his murder mystery, a chemist seeking the structure of a new compound, use little of the formal and logical modes of reasoning. Through a series of intuitions, surmises, fancies, they stumble upon the right explanation, and have a knack of seizing it when it once comes within reach.

  Gilbert N. Lewis

  Murder Mysteries, Intuition, Littles

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• Who am I that I should urge these missionaries to confess their sins in public, when, for all I know, they may be living nearer to God than I am? The Spirit of God does not need me to act as His detective.

  Jonathan Goforth

  Doe, Needs, May

  Jonathan Goforth (0101). “"By my Spirit"”, p.8, Solid Christian Books

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• It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers,the people, the common man,prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling bad things than in selling good things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Book, Gun, Men

  Ludwig Von Mises (1963). “Human action: a treatise on economics”

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• Garrett must have sensed I was awake. "Hey Detective," he said to Uncle Bob, who was now trudging across the grating toward us. "I think we're losing her. I have no choice but to perform mouth-to-mouth." "Don't you dare," I said, my lids still in lockdown.

  Darynda Jones

  Uncles, Thinking, Choices

  Darynda Jones (2011). “First Grave on the Right”, p.127, Macmillan

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• These days we don’t have to fit into something other people think we are. We’ve leveled the playing field, life is inclusive. I’m a mom, sex detective, wife, fearless, gentle — we can now, with grace, be all of what we are.

  Mariska Hargitay

  Mom, Sex, Thinking

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• Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill. These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe – the only lady private detective in Botswana – brewed redbush tea. And three mugs – one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course.

  Alexander McCall Smith

  Mma, Two, White

  Alexander McCall Smith (2008). “The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency”, p.11, Hachette UK

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• In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.

  Nic Pizzolatto

  Summer, Writing, Ideas

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• Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then… justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads.

  Stefan Petrucha

  Real, Hero, Ocean

  Stefan Petrucha (2012). “Ripper”, Penguin

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• When, and how, and at what stage of our development did spirituality and our strange notions of religion arise? the need for worship which is nothing more than our frightened refuge into propitiation of a Creator we do not understand? A detective story, the supreme Who-done-it, written in indecipherable hieroglyphics, no Rosetta stone supplied by the consummate Mystifier to tease us poor fumbling unravellers of his plot.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Women, Religion, Plot

  Victoria Sackville-West, Vita Sackville-West (1985). “No Signposts in the Sea”, Penguin Group USA

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• The problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing, or, as Sherlock Holmes, the meticulous English detective, declared to his partner, Dr. Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.

  Joe Navarro

  People, Drs, Problem

  Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins (2009). “What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

  Cyril Connolly

  Writing, Novelists, Stories

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• When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.

  Carolyn Wells

  Book, Writing, Long

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• These detective series on TV always end at precisely the right moment-after the criminal is arrested and before the court turns him loose.

  Robert Orben

  Punishment, Tvs, Criminals

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• A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man’s business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man’s counting house… The law will of necessity have Indus[tr]ial features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state.

  Richard E. Byrd

  Home, Eye, Army

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• 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

  Character, Successful, Issues

  S. S. Van Dine (2015). “Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories”, p.6, Booklassic

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• It is difficult to distinguish deduction from what in other circumstances is called problem-solving. And concept learning, inference, and reasoning by analogy are all instances of inductive reasoning. (Detectives typically induce, rather than deduce.) None of these things can be done separately from each other, or from anything else. They are pseudo-categories.

  Frank Smith

  Pseudo, Done, Analogies

  Frank Smith (2014). “To Think: In Language, Learning and Education”, p.25, Routledge

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• If this "critical openminded attitude" ... is wanted, the question at once arises, Is it science that should be studied in order to achieve it? Why not study law? A judge has to do everything that a scientist is exhorted to do in the way of withholding judgment until all the facts are in, and then judging impartially on the merits of the case as well as he can. ... Why not a course in Sherlock Holmes? The detectives, or at least the detective-story writers, join with the scientists in excoriating "dogmatic prejudice, lying, falsification of facts, and data, and willful fallacious reasoning."

  Anthony Standen

  Attitude, Lying, Science

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• The psychological detective story in "Equus" made Peter Shaffer's name as a playwright. But it was his next play, "Amadeus," that cemented his reputation, largely because of the movie version. Another battle of wills, it was the story of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seen through the eyes of lesser composer Antonio Salieri.

  Bob Mondello

  Eye, Play, Names

  "British Playwright Peter Shaffer, Who Wrote 'Equus,' Dies At 90". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. June 6, 2016.

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• Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.

  William Zinsser

  Self, Adjectives, Obstacles

  William Knowlton Zinsser (1980). “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I'm convinced we all are voyeurs. It's part of the detective thing. We want to know secrets and we want to know what goes on behind those windows. And not in a way that we would use to hurt anyone. There's an entertainment value to it, but at the same time we want to know: What do humans do? Do they do the same things as I do? It's a gaining of some sort of knowledge, I think.

  David Lynch

  Hurt, Thinking, Secret

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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