Daniel Woodrell Quotes

We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

Part of the power of all storytelling is reassurance, offering hope to those sat in the darkness, that good can succeed and wrongdoing fail.

I think that fiction is an excellent place for us to struggle with questions of good and evil, and humanity and inhumanity.

I've been playing both sides of the law my entire career. It's not really surprising for me to be doing opposing sides simultaneously. I would argue that even though my character on 'Hawaii Five-0' originated on the wrong side of the law, I'd say he's worked his way over to the good side.

I never write thinking, 'What would a woman do?' any more than I think, 'What would a man do?' It comes down to what would a solid detective do in these circumstances.

For me, I really like the human drama embedded in a crime story, and I like the way European films do that.

When you're talking about villainy, then you're automatically circling around to talk about justice.

We tend to think of crime fiction as reading designed for entertainment - not education. It delivers an almost pure kind of readerly pleasure: the mystery solved, justice delivered, roughly or otherwise.

The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime.

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.

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

The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

One thing I was thinking about is that they probably get their come-uppance about the same percentage that people in real life do. Basically, stealing for all practical purposes might as well be legal in New York.

We've had crooks from the beginning of time... it's always very interesting and troubling why good people do bad things.

I approach serious subjects, and I like to have the good guys win and have the parents among the good guys.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.

Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot…change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.

Can law, human law, change the nature of things? Can it turn darkness into light, or evil into good? By no means. Notwithstanding ten thousand laws, right is right, and wrong is wrong still. There must still remain an essential difference between justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. … Who can reconcile this treatment of the Negroes, first and last, with either mercy or justice?