Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

When I was a kid, I loved Sherlock Holmes. I'm not interested in crimes. I'm interested in the mind of the detective and his process, which to me is a lot like the artist.

Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.

You know my methods. Apply them.

If you are to be Hercule Poirot, you must think of everything.

Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.

Like all Holmes' reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes.

Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.

We will pursue every factor, every element, every second of the timeline, of the final hours of Maurice's life. We will pursue that relentlessly. That will be our quest from now on.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

Forensics I've always found absolutely fascinating. Anything to do with clues. And checking things out and solving.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

I was the weirdest kid: I wanted to see the police file - in grade school! I was convinced I could crack the case if I just had that file.

if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other

I'm not a great student, so I don't know that I would have been a great detective. Part of my brain sort of works that way, like wanting to figure out puzzles and figure out what happened and why people do the things they do and who they are and how it happened.

There's something wonderful about that sort of Poirot, Agatha Christie-style investigation: cross-questioning all the witnesses and checking their stories, looking for means, motive, and opportunity.

Midsomer' is a throwback to the old detective tradition, in which everything happens in the head of one man. Everything depends on his intuition and experience.

I could imagine actually being a scientist or a detective, but not a detective who puts his hands into gory, bloody things. But more like someone who figures things out. I like to figure things out.

When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.

It is quite a three-pipe problem.

It is by logic we prove. It is by intuition we discover.

Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.