W. H. Auden Quotes

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

Reading my way all the way through Sherlock Holmes gave me a lifelong love for crime and detective fiction.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

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.

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

Where there's a will there's a detective story.

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.

I had a publishing history of murder mysteries.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

I read a lot of detective novels.

Crime fiction is the new rock n' roll.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

I love the whole mystery-detective genre - I love all of that.

I'm really into the detective drama genre.

The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

How different from the cosy world of Rüya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.

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

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.

Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.

Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course.