Private Investigator Quotes

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

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.

I like to consider myself a detective, which is how I justify my obsession with my phone. By nature, since I was a kid, I've always wanted to be a detective, and any portal to information and investigating things I have ever been given access to, I have dived into. With my phone, unfortunately, I have immediate access to everything.

I play a detective, very close to myself actually.

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

I've always wanted to play a hard-boiled gumshoe, as they say.

'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 was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

[Sherlock Holmes] has moved from being someone who was sociopathic, work-obsessed and slightly amoral, into being someone who has a certain degree of a private life, which is very, very private, with The Woman, or Irene Adler.

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.

'The Nice Guys' fulfilled my 1970s fantasy.

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

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

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

From the time I got the first couple of scripts [of Jessica Jones], I always felt that this was groundbreaking material and a groundbreaking character.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

'The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'.

Eddie Drake is sort of this loose cannon, funny, edgy guy, who has this really foolish, foolish mustache.

I've really been very focused on 'Jessica Jones.' Our series was well on its way to being created by the time we even saw scripts from 'Daredevil,' and 'Luke Cage' didn't even have a showrunner hired then. Jeph Loeb [Marvel TV boss] is the master of the connective tissue, but each series exists in its own world.

I did surveillance a lot, which sounds exciting, but it never was.

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most.

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.

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.

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.