A Quote by Otto Penzler

To this day, I've never figured out a single locked-room mystery. — © Otto Penzler
To this day, I've never figured out a single locked-room mystery.
When a locked-room mystery doesn't work, the solution makes you groan, and the book gets hurled across the room.
Pain is like a new room in your house that you never knew you had. If you had known, you would have bolted and locked the room past any entering. But truly, it is a room like any other, four glaring white walls and a dark hard floor, and if you don't try to get out, it is possible to remain in it. Once you tried to get out, you ... couldn't ... stand ... it. Don't think of getting out.
David Roberts, who is a writer at Vox who I like, had a line about the voter - your voters weren`t locked in the room with you, Republican establishment. You were locked in the room with them.
A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone,' in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican's daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered.
It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.
I used to play against a high school football team that always used to run the single wing. And eventually, other teams figured out that they ran the single wing. And so they prepared for it. The Democrats are stuck running the single wing.
If you have the talent and passion and commitment, you shouldn't be locked out of the room.
A lot of locked-room mysteries take time for you to pay attention and see the setup. They aren't thrillers, and they don't move along. The modern mystery story is really faster-paced, and I think modern readers tend to prefer seeing something happening on every other page.
There are different usage patterns - I never do email during the day. I don't multitask well at all. I don't know how to be in a meeting and participate and be on email at the same time. I do see some people do it more effectively. I've never quite figured that out.
You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.
I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.
our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions.
I have seen extreme lows because of factors that were not in my hands - be it not having money to buy my first bike, dropping out of a prestigious engineering college without having a single rupee in my bank account, living with seven boys in a single-room kitchen in Mumbai, or eating nothing but khichdi every day. But I cherish all those moments.
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them – the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms – and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples give off and that permeated the air – the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere – despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this.
But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
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