Detective Work Quotes

Chuckling to herself, Nancy said aloud, "Romance and detective work won't mix tonight!

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

Your novels show only the tiniest fraction of detective work, the brilliant crime, the tantalizing clues, the dramatic chase, the final battle atop a lofty peak with ocean waves crashing down below, and then… justice served! If they wrote about the real world, four-fifths of the story would consist of the hero sitting in a library for months and following false leads.

You just work really hard and scrutinize. What is it called in politics? "Opposition research"? You want to do the detective work on your client so to speak before your opponent can dig it up. We're vetting everything thoroughly.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again." Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.

Anything is easy to the man who sees.... The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised.