Detectives Quotes - Page 7

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Thinking, Historical, Important

  "Bigger than Dan Brown" by Gary Younge, www.theguardian.com. July 17, 2005.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

  E. M. Forster

  Plot, Elements, Mystery

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.132, RosettaBooks

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• And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

  Nic Pizzolatto

  Race, Talking, Next

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com. 2014.

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• Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.

  Sarah Vowell

  Caring, Nerd, Ulysses's Grant

  Sarah Vowell (2003). “The Partly Cloudy Patriot”, p.91, Simon and Schuster

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• The girl's face was the color of talcum. Her uncle's was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane's was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He'd never forget this night, the detective knew, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. (Speak To Me Of Death)

  Cornell Woolrich

  Girl, Uncles, Fear

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• The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

  Raymond Chandler

  Jobs, Writing, Perfect

  Raymond Chandler (2014). “The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words”, p.244, Vintage

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• In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Writing, Trying, Narrative

  "Reliving the fall of Sparta". Interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez, www.nationalreview.com. December 22, 2011.

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• THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is unlike True Detective as: it features women who do things. THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is like True Detective as: we shamelessly rip off huge chunks of stuff from Alan Moore.

  Kieron Gillen

  Rip, Wicked, Stuff

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• If the detective should suffer overmuch from the artistic temperament, and his fellow lodger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a wrist or the timber of a feminine voice, so much the better for us. Literature never produced a relationship more symbiotic nor a warmer and more timeless friendship.

  Loren D. Estleman

  Voice, Suffering, Literature

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• 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.

  Patti Smith

  Writing, Secret, Desire

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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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• I read a lot of detective stories because they always deliver. They give you a beginning, a middle, and an end - a resolution. The modern novels I read don't always deliver because I'm looking essentially for a story. As in Shakespeare, "The play's the thing." In particular I read detective stories for pacing, plot and suspense.

  Robert Cormier

  Modern Novel, Play, Giving

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• The Big Sleep' would have been a more effective study of nightmarish existence had the detective been more complicated and had more curiosity been shown about his sweetheart's relation to the crime.

  Manny Farber

  Sleep, Curiosity, Study

  Manny Farber (2016). “Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Faber: A Special Publication of The Library of America”, p.564, Library of America

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