Detectives Quotes - Page 5

• I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!

  Mary McCarthy

  Character, Three, Stories

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• I had many, many, many death threats. I couldn't open letters for a long time, because they all had to be opened by either the FBI or somebody. I couldn't open letters. I had to be escorted. In fact, just recently I went to a funeral, Calvin Wardlaw, who was the detective -- the policeman -- with me for two years, passed away just recently. He and I got to be bosom buddies really, but that was the hardest part. I wasn't able to enjoy -- you know.

  Hank Aaron

  Years, Two, Long

  "Home Run King". The Academy of Achievement, www.achievement.org. September 10, 2013.

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• There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect.

  Eric Hoffer

  Reading, Profound, Reason Why

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Art, Brother, Book

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, David Stuart Davies (1998). “The Best of Sherlock Holmes”, p.200, Wordsworth Editions

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• All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Drama, Successful, Play

  Eugene Ionesco (2015). “Amedee, The New Tenant, Victims of Duty: Three Plays”, p.79, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Bosh. I find a rival - but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner - I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you.

  Rex Stout

  Rivals, Foxes, Bedroom

  Rex Stout (2010). “Bad for Business”, p.34, Bantam

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• If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don't think we'll be doing 'True Detective.'

  Nic Pizzolatto

  Writing, Thinking, Likes

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• I could have just said I'm good at my job, but I didn't. Didn't want the police thinking I was holding out information when I wasn't. "I've got one advantage over a normal homicide detective, I expect it to be a monster. No one ever calls me in if it's just a stabbing, or a hit-and-run. I don't spend a lot of time trying to come up with nice, normal explanations. It means I get to ignore a lot of theories.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Running, Jobs, Nice

  Laurell K. Hamilton (2011). “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Collection 1-5”, p.1693, Penguin

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• The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.

  Ben Aaronovitch

  Drinking, Sleep, Home

  Ben Aaronovitch (2011). “Moon Over Soho”, p.33, Del Rey

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• I'm not a detective from Baker Street or an old lady who solves crimes while she's knitting in an easy chair. I'm just a book girl. So I can't make a deduction, only take a flight of fancy--er, forget I said that. I meant, I can only take a guess.

  Mizuki Nomura

  Girl, Book, Knitting

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• My first job was with the Burns Detective Agency. They sent me over to the East River to guard coal barges during these god-awful hours like three to six in the morning. It wasn't a very difficult job -- all I had to do was make a round every fifteen minutes -- but it turned out to be a great environment for writing. I was completely alone in a little outhouse with an electric heater and a little desk.

  Sam Shepard

  Morning, Jobs, Writing

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• There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living — cook books and detective stories.

  Rex Stout

  Book, Writing, Two

  "Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout". Book by John McAleer, p.3, 1983.

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• Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

  George Santayana

  Philosophy, Ideas, Philosopher

  George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.201, Рипол Классик

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• You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wine, Character, Artist

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II”, p.434

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• 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.

  Stephen Leacock

  Book, Stories, World

  Stephen Leacock, Robertson Davies (1981). “The Penguin Stephen Leacock”, Penguin ; Markham, Ont. : Penguin Books Canada

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• So, I got into the law enforcement game. I worked for an outfit called Newton Detective Agency for a while. I worked eight hours on the waterfront making sure the longshoremen didn't take too many things.

  Clint Walker

  Agency, Eight, Law

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• Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones.

  Rex Stout

  Stories, Lasts, Firsts

  "The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times". Book by Van Dore, p. 251, 1942.

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• Anything is easy to the man who sees.... The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised.

  Samuel Hopkins Adams

  Real, Eye, Men

  Samuel Hopkins Adams (2005). “Average Jones”, p.17, 1st World Publishing

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• Human beings are like detectives. They love a mystery. They love going where the mystery pulls them. What we don't like is a mystery that's solved completely. It's a letdown. It always seems less than what we imagined when the mystery was present. The last scene in `Blow Up' is so perfect because you leave the theater still dreaming. Or the end of `Chinatown,' where the guy says `Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.' It explains so much but it only gives you a dream of a bigger mystery. Like life. For me, I want to solve certain things but leave some room to dream.

  David

  Dream, Blow, Giving

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• Television is making, there was in independent film renaissance late '80s through the mid-90's. It was an amazing time. Television is doing that right now. So that's why everybody wants to do it. I mean if you're writing stuff like, you know, Fargo, or True Detective, or any of these things that are on, Breaking Bad, there are no rules in television.

  Billy Bob Thornton

  Mean, Independent, Writing

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

  Paul Auster

  Reading, Writing, School

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• I was enamored of detectives as a teenager. I liked what they did - piecing things together, thinking about situations. But to get there? Eight to ten years in a patrol car? I didn't have that in me. I didn't want to tell people what to do.

  Michael Connelly

  Teenager, Thinking, Eight

  "Michael Connelly on Writing for Men". Interview with Tom Chiarella, www.esquire.com. November 25, 2013.

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• I never have liked detective dramas. I try to watch all of them to see what's going on, but I don't like them.

  Kevin Whately

  Drama, Trying, Watches

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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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• 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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