Paul Auster Quotes

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

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'.

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.

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

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

I read all the Agatha Christies when I was younger and like Sherlock Holmes. Crime fiction has always fascinated me, but I'll read anything anyone gives me.

I read a lot of detective novels.

I was reading Agatha Christie as a little boy.

I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.

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

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

Bookstores never seem to know where to put me on the shelves. But I do. I love my genre and I love those writers, so I am happy to be considered a crime writer. That's what I consider myself.

I hate academic mysteries. As soon as I come across the word 'don' and it's not someone's first name, I close the book.

I adore all Agatha Christie's books and turn to them whenever I'm ill or need cheering up.

The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.

I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.

I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.

I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.

I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover.

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

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.

People read more mysteries than they do political pamphlets.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.