Top 73 Detectives Quotes & Sayings

I told him about me being a summoner, and what that entailed. At the end of he simply gave a long sigh. “Why couldn’t you simply be an alcoholic like all the other detectives?” I grinned. “Demon summoning has less vomiting!

Spinach and champagne. Going back to the kitchens at the old Waldorf. Dancing on the kitchen tables, wearing the chef's headgear. Finally, a crash and being escorted out by the house detectives.

I'm a nut for these 'crime reality' shows. Things like 'Forensic Files,' 'Forensic Detectives.'

People are fascinated by the darker sides of human nature, and I think they're also interested in seeing the ability that a particular detective or group of detectives might have to solve the crime and put the world right again.

Personally, I like those mystery shows. Ever since I was a kid I've been crazy about blood and detectives and murder. Maybe I was born with a silver knife in my back.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

I know when I was here prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, one of the most effective units here was the cold case squad, which had on it FBI agents, as well as Metropolitan Police Department homicide detectives working together.

I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.

I've always noticed that Old Families, like plumbers and barbers and possibly drummers and detectives, seem to have some kind of reciprocity arrangement in the South. Members of the freemasonry could move anywhere ... and still operate cozily in the local Old Family top drawer.

I think we take for granted police officers and detectives that walk into some pretty heinous situations, and they really have to be very brave. So I love playing a character that's very brave - someone that kind of dives in the fire to figure out what's happened.

The kind of issues that we face as detectives are similar to what the other married couples out there are facing, or the brother and sister, or the brother and brother are facing. Relationships are universal.

A lot of the appeal of internal medicine is Sherlockian—solving the case from the clues. We are detectives; we revel in the process of figuring it all out. It’s what doctors most love to do.

I want my job to include a little adventure, a little more of a heightened reality than what I'm actually living. And 'Castle' has that. He gets this opportunity to tail these homicide detectives, and he's driven by that. He's a little immature, but he's obviously loving life.

Women always find you out when you lie. Always. No matter what, they always find out. They're like detectives.

Over and over, nature shows that it's a really tough adversary. That's why it's important that we invest in laboratories, disease detectives, research, mosquito control, the public health system around the world to find, stop, track, prevent health threats.

Investigation?" Isabelle laughed. "Now we're detectives? Maybe we should all have code names." "Good idea," said Jace. "I shall be Baron Hotschaft Von Hugenstein.

The righting of historic wrongs has chimed with something fundamental in me since I was a young reader. I love the forensic skills, the psychological insights, and the sheer bloody-mindedness of various detectives - professional or accidental - inching toward the truth of a long-buried secret.

My strongest hope is for a cameo as a band playing in a club visited by the detectives on 'Law & Order: SVU' during the course of an investigation, maybe during sound check, or something, so they can force us to stop playing while they question the sound guy.

Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.

Well, when you have an opportunity to build a show around one of the greatest detectives in all of literature, you're going to jump at that opportunity.

My novels are never directly based on a true crime incident, but I want to get the details right. I want to know how homicide detectives think, what a SWAT team might do to prepare.

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.

A woman went so far as to hire private detectives to contact me to help bring her out of what she called a hypnotic trance.

In the 1970s, there was a trend for all detectives on TV to have some quirk or gimmick, and this was often physical.

I think all scientists are like detectives. We are most happy when we find something that doesn't fit our expectations.

Detectives are only human; we're not Gods that know everything. When detectives tell their theory, in reality, most are rather anxious. Thinking that there's always possibility that they could have missed something, somewhere... But in return, the excitement you experience when your theory's smack bang correct is twice as great!

What is interesting, as well, is how much power homicide detectives have and how much respect. They are kind of rock stars, especially in New York. There are not that many of them.

I love people, studying people. That's the Scorpio part of me. We are natural detectives; we like to find things out.

Personally I had the opportunity to go on several ride alongs with the LA County Sheriff's Department with some amazing detectives, who were invaluable to me.

Yes. I did more research than I ever wanted to and saw some things I wish I didn't. I went on ride-alongs, spent time with Homicide, Cold Case, and SVU detectives, hung out in subways learning how to spot pervs and pick-pockets, viewed an autopsy, went to a police firing range, and witnessed court cases and I read, read, read.

I remember when I was 12, talking with my friends about what we wanted to do with our lives, astronauts, forensic detectives, all these different jobs. And the only thing I could think was an actor.

Yes, and many times it's frustrating, because I'm simply part of the show, and I'm not in the creative end of it, who goes out with detectives and tries to find these things out.

I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!

Not all detectives are the same - some play bad cop, some are awkward, some are funny.

I was enamored of detectives as a teenager. I liked what they did - piecing things together, thinking about situations. But to get there? Eight to ten years in a patrol car? I didn't have that in me. I didn't want to tell people what to do.

I found out that detectives are really good dressers. I'm not even exaggerating. The woman I interviewed had these fantastic fuschia suede heels on that I coveted. And that they're invested in their jobs the same way you and I might be. We think of them as doing these jobs that we could never imagine doing, but their relationship to what they do is the same as our relationship to what we do.

The cops picked me up for attempted murder. I can still see the detectives, licking their chops. Thought they had me. Two weeks later, the cat came out of a coma and told the truth. I was innocent.

We wanted to make Tucker's Witch just more human and playful, because I don't think we see enough playfulness between characters on TV. It's like, "Who really gives a damn about two detectives on a case?" The sillier we went, the better it worked.

When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.

Too many times I see these omnipotent detectives who know everything, who pull up in really slick cars, and their hair's all really nice and the girls fall in love with them. They haven't earned the right. It just doesn't happen like that.

Since the era of 'Sherlock Holmes,' private detectives had long been able to influence cases on their own. But the online detective, who had no sort of professional training or even long practice, is a purely modern phenomenon. The Internet changed everything by letting anyone become a self-appointed 'expert' on a case.

With 'Black Rain,' I spent a lot of time with homicide detectives, and I spent a lot of time with different brokers on 'Wall Street.' It helps get the rhythm of the piece and the tone, and how overplayed or underplayed it might be. That's also the magic of movies: You get to hang out and live these different lives.

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

The criminal is a creative artist; detectives are just critics.

You're right on the money with that. We're all like detectives in life. There's something at the end of the trail that we're all looking for.

I've played lots of law enforcement agents, and I do have friends that are in the bureau, in the DEA, and who are detectives and captains.

I went to a mystery writers conference ... and I learned a lot not only from the faculty - and in the faculty we had forensic doctors, detectives, policemen, experts in guns, etc. - but from the questions of the students.

It's a very, very fascinating story for me, cause it's about a man who's been doing bad; bad things. And he's a father of four children in parochial school, he's a lieutenant of detectives, but he's in conflict with himself and with trying to do what's right.

Longest book was '2666' by Roberto Bolano, and it was an irregular reading experience. I read the first four parts during a cross-country plane trip, reading at slightly slower-than-usual speed but surprised at how accessible the book was compared with 'The Savage Detectives.'

Well I think that the mind of a serial killer and the mind of the detectives represent the duality we face as people.

Dirk Gently [from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency], needs a sidekick, as all good detectives do, and he gets this message from the universe that this guy, Todd Brotzman, played by Elijah Wood, is the guy to help him through this mystery. But of course, that doesn't really explain the breadth of it.

I think TV has been a little bit irresponsible in how they portray these people because homicide detectives are not brooding, tortured souls who are stained with the stink of the city and who have blood on their hands. They are real, live people that are incredibly entertaining.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

The goal of 'Data Detectives' is to spark the imagination of students around the globe by making them think about new technologies that will impact humanity in ways similar to language and art.

It is difficult to distinguish deduction from what in other circumstances is called problem-solving. And concept learning, inference, and reasoning by analogy are all instances of inductive reasoning. (Detectives typically induce, rather than deduce.) None of these things can be done separately from each other, or from anything else. They are pseudo-categories.

The most successful detectives owe their success to noticing small signs. Scouts are natural detectives and never let the smallest detail escape them. These small things are called by Scouts 'Sign.'

My family are police officers, detectives. My brother Mitch is FBI. Mitch is like that - a stern enforcer.

I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.

When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.

The problem with Maigret is he hasn't got a limp, and he hasn't got a lisp, and he hasn't got a French accent, or a particular love of opera... or all those other things that people tend to attach to many fictional detectives. He's just an ordinary guy doing an extraordinary job, in a very interesting time.