Detective Stories Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  Anne Frank

  Thinking, People, Interesting

  Anne Frank, General Press (2016). “The Diary of a Young Girl”, p.127, GENERAL PRESS

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• I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with question [why I'm write these stories]. It's not a question that you would ask a guy that writes detective stories or the guy that writes mystery stories, or westerns, or whatever. But it is asked of the writer of horror stories because it seems that there is something nasty about our love for horror stories, or boogies, ghosts and goblins, demons and devils.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Horror Stories, Guy

  Interview with Phil Konstantin, americanindian.net. July 1987.

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

  Stephen Hopkins

  Believe, Thinking, Stories

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

  Chester Himes

  Thinking, Numbers, Black

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• The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

  Raymond Chandler

  Book, Average, Doe

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• Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it.
  Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
  The only place success comes before work is a dictionary
  Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Wish, Detectives, Fiction

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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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• In detective stories . . . I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but . . . there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild.

  Bertrand Russell

  Detectives, Stories, Vicarious

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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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• I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.

  Alan Greenspan

  Together, Stories, Detectives

  Source: www.today.com

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• I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.

  Rex Stout

  Mean, Thinking, Democracy

  "The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times". Book by Mark Van Doren (pp. 248 - 249), 1942.

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• Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Fun, Views, Justice

  Dorothy L. Sayers, Jill Paton Walsh (1999). “Thrones, Dominations”, p.126, Macmillan

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

  Philip Guedalla

  Mind, Detectives, Normal

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

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

  P. D. James

  Order, Restoration, Stories

  Quoted in Face, Dec. 1986

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• I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Jobs, Writing, Thinking

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2012). “The Nine Tailors”, p.486, Open Road Media

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• A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Alive, Detectives

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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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• Listen, darling, tomorrow I'll buy you a whole lot of detective stories, but don't worry your pretty little head over mysteries tonight.

  Dashiell Hammett

  Worry, Stories, Tonight

  Dashiell Hammett (1965). “The novels of Dashiell Hammett”

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• 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.

  Sergio Aragones

  Humorous, Gdp, Stories

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• 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.

  Steig Larsson

  Two, Stories, Detectives

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

  Rex Stout

  Games, Balls, Stories

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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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• Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Stories, Detectives

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

  Jeffery Deaver

  Stories, Detectives, Tradition

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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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