Top 111 Detective Quotes

Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ was published while I was trying to work out how to write ‘Elizabeth Is Missing,’ and reading the story of that impaired amateur detective gave me the licence I needed to attempt one of my own.

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

Getting to do what I think was my fifth BBC drama with Nikki Amuka-Bird – we’ve done ‘Shoot The Messenger,’ ‘Five Days,’ ‘The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,’ ‘Born Equal’ and now ‘Small Island’ – was another highlight for me. And filming in Jamaica was great, too.

I’ve always wanted to play a detective. Always loved detective shows, right back to ‘Columbo’, ‘The Rockford Files’, ‘Starsky & Hutch’.

I’ve developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There’s a women’s detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police.

I watch all the shows. From ‘Breaking Bad’ to ‘Game of Thrones.’ ‘Scandal’ and ‘True Detective.’

Sue Grafton’s ‘A Is for Alibi’, the 1982 novel that introduced the world to private detective Kinsey Millhone, wasn’t seen as the pioneering achievement we now know it to be.

I used to think the store detective had followed me all the way home and would knock on the door and go, ‘Hello, is this your daughter? She’s got three blue lipsticks and a moisturiser from Boots in her bag.’ We just used to nick crap. Not even stuff we wanted.

I didn’t grow up watching detective shows. I’ve never even seen an episode of ‘CSI.’

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.

‘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.

I loved ‘True Detective’ so much in Season 1, and then when the Season 2 monstrosity came around, I was like, ‘What is this show? What have you done to this show?’

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there’s a detective and a criminal who’s committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

I’m usually late to the game on shows and watch them after they’ve aired. But I love ‘House of Cards,’ ‘The Killing,’ ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ loved ‘True Detective,’ and ‘Arrested Development’ when it was on. Also ‘The Wire,’ though I was way late to the game on that.

The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective’s personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

A conventional crime story is simple – it’s just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

I think a lot of us responded intensely to ‘True Detective’ because it was so incredibly earnest. That’s what made it heartbreaking and involving.

I wanted to be a police detective. In my work, particularly in documentaries, I am obsessed with finding things out, seeking ever-new facts and perspectives – each project can involve years of research.

It’s rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

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.

When we saw ‘The Knick’ or ‘True Detective,’ they had very distinct scores that were doing very distinct things.

I chose ‘No. 1 Ladies’ Detective,’ or I’ll say it chose me, and it was an absolute blessing, for the experience of being in Africa for seven months and learning so many different things, from languages to foods to greetings. On so many levels, it was an incredible experience.

Definitely, ‘True Detective’ was a great example of one director, one story. It worked fantastically well. Well, I thought it worked fantastically well; I know a lot people didn’t.

For everything bad, there’s a million really exciting things, whether it’s someone puts out a really great book, there’s a new movie, there’s a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.

When wearing a trench coat, you’re allowed to act like Humphrey Bogart when he was detective Sam Spade.

I could never be anyone I’ve played. I am so not a detective; I can barely get 200 yards from A to B with the help of Google maps, and I am just about the least observant person on the planet, so I never notice what people look like or how they walk or if they’re committing a crime in broad daylight.

There’s a lot of two-hander dialogue in ‘True Detective,’ and I needed to place those guys in locations where there were other levels of visual storytelling. It didn’t necessarily have to move the plot forward, but it had to add tone or add to the overall feeling.

I’ve seen ‘True Detective’ end-to-end at least three times; I’ll probably see it again. It is a work of dark brilliance. But if the phone goes fifteen minutes from the end of that last episode, I’ll likely turn it off and go make coffee when I’m done with the call.

I’ve been watching detective shows, like ‘Wallander’ and the Danish ‘The Killing.’ I’m like, ‘That would be kind of fun to do.’

We were seeing TV becoming increasingly cinematic, with stuff like ‘True Detective.’ And ‘Game of Thrones’ opened up ‘genre TV’ and showed it doesn’t have to be cheesy.

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

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.

A pulp story without a detective and, obviously, somebody for him to do battle with is unthinkable, and I can’t remember reading a pulp story that didn’t have a dame – either a good girl or a bad girl.

You get to crack the code of the play. You get to really pick at it and see, ‘What is the story that we’re telling?’ ‘What are the clues in the text that I can find that will help inform what story we’re telling?’ It’s almost like a detective mystery.

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

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

‘True Detective’ did change my career.

‘True Detective’ would not pass The Bechdel Test.

My detective just told me, ‘Seriously, you are in danger and you have to change all your information.’ But I said no because my name, Park Yeon-mi, is my legacy from my father, that’s the only one he just left me. I’m very proud of my name so that’s why if I die I’m ok.

My nana was a detective; my nana was a great cop. You also have bad cops that were bullied in school or whatever and think that they have power, and that makes other cops look bad.

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

I’d love to do a Columbo-type detective character in a series.

For the finale, I thought the audience deserved to get a close point of view on the monster, and to recognize him the way you recognize the heroes of ‘True Detective.’

Britain can claim to lead the world in murder because it was a country that industrialized early. Other countries, going through the same process later, caught up and produced their own genres of detective fiction.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

I try to keep each different book different from the last. So ‘Sag Harbor’ is very different from ‘Apex Hides the Hurt;’ ‘The Intuitionist,’ which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from ‘John Henry Days.’ I’m just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

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.

If there was one overarching theme to ‘True Detective,’ I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by – so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

As a kid, I always wanted to be lots of things. I was a Walter Mitty type. I wanted to be in the French Foreign Legion, a detective, a doctor, a test pilot with a scarf, a fisherman who hauled in a tremendous marlin after a 12-hour fight.