A Quote by Philip Guedalla

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

Philip Guedalla

Quote Topics

Detective Detective Story Minds Noble Normal Recreation Story

Quote Author

Philip Guedalla
English - Historian
March 12, 1889 - December 16, 1944

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.

Rex Stout

What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.

Dashiell Hammett

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

Raymond Chandler

Occasionally, I have written about stories related to crime, but I have never attempted a traditional detective story. So I want to write a true detective story.

Ruskin Bond

I often use detective elements in my books. I love detective novels. But I also think science fiction and detective stories are very close and friendly genres, which shows in the books by Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, and Glen Cook. However, whilst even a tiny drop of science fiction may harm a detective story, a little detective element benefits science fiction. Such a strange puzzle.

Sergei Lukyanenko

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

Otto Penzler

Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.

Mark Waid

I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a detective and there is a large deal of detection in the short story.

Mary Lavin

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

Peter Shaffer

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

Chester Himes

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

Agatha Christie

It's a principle that anything our leaders do is for noble reasons. It may be mistaken, it may be ugly, but basically noble. And if you bring in normal moderate, conservative, strategic, economic objectives you threatening that principle.

Noam Chomsky

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

Frank Lloyd Wright

What you admire in others will develop in yourself. Therefore, to love the ordinary in any one is to become ordinary, while to love the noble and the lofty in all minds is to grow into the likeness of that which is noble and lofty.