65 Crime Fiction Quotes To Love

Crime fiction has a unique ability to grip readers with its intricate plots, unforgettable characters, and the timeless battle between good and evil. At its heart, the genre weaves tension and mystery into narratives that leave us on the edge of our seats. Quotes from crime fiction often encapsulate the essence of this thrilling genre, offering insights into the minds of both heroes and villains. In this collection, we present 65 of the most captivating crime fiction quotes that capture the allure of danger, intrigue, and justice. Whether you're a lifelong aficionado of detective stories or a newcomer to the genre, these words promise to ignite your imagination and deepen your appreciation for crime fiction's enduring appeal.

1. “I came, I saw, I concurred...” - Darren E. Laws

2. “We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.” - John D. MacDonald

3. “All I knew was, my Father was famous for being a loser, and a loser that wanted nothing to do with me, since the day I was born.” - Holly Hood

4. “Flowers are fragile and ephemeral...Even if you meant to protect them with a surrounding fence from wind and rain, they would die without sunlight...and a spindly fence has no power against a strong wind. - Haibara Ai” - Gosho Aoyama

5. “A detective who uses his deductive powers to corner a suspect and then does nothing to stop them from committing suicide is no better than a murderer himself. - Kudo Shinichi” - Gosho Aoyama

6. “Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence.” - P.D. James

7. “Harry sensed the onset of resignation. No, he bloody didn't! On the FBI course they had examined cases where it had taken more than ten years to catch the killer. As a rule, it had been one tiny random detail, it seemed, that had solved the case. However, what actually cracked it was the fact that they had never given up, they had gone all fifteen rounds and if the opponent was still standing they screamed for a return fight.” - Jo Nesbø

8. “I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.” - Catherine Astolfo

9. “Call me Dudley. We're of equal rank. I'm older, but you're far better looking. I can tell we're going to be grand partners.” - James Ellroy

10. “She knew with chilling and absolute certainty she was next.” - Alexa Grace

11. “You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it. ~Pat Obuchowski” - Laurie Stevens

12. “There was a ringing in his ears, like a dead phone line that he couldn’t hang up on.” - Mark Capell

13. “Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology.Snappy dresser, though.” - Kathy Reichs

14. “Before man can explore outer space he should first learn to explore the Inner Space of his mind.” - Merlin Fraser

15. “I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain't a heck of a way to be in bed with a pretty woman. The two of you arguing about murder, and threatening each other, when you're supposed to be in love and you could be doing something pretty nice. And then I thought, well, maybe it ain't so strange after all. Maybe it's like this with most people, everyone doing pretty much the same thing except in a different way. And all the time they're holding heaven in their hands.” - Jim Thompson

16. “Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.” - Jim Thompson

17. “The whole thing becomes like this evil enchantment from a fairy tale, but you're made to believe the spell can never be broken.” - Jess C. Scott

18. “Listen, we got two stiffs and a river of red in a villa in Herne Bay...” - Rhys Chamberlain

19. “Chapter 1I was sitting in Tina's Sunset Restaurant, watching the outriggers shuffle lazily through the clear waters of Sabang Bay, when Tomboy took a seat opposite me, ordered a San Miguel from Tina's daughter, and told me someone else had to die. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and up until that point I'd been in a good mood.I told him I didn't want to kill people anymore, that it was a part of my past I didn't want to be reminded of, and he replied that he understood all that, but once again we needed the money. 'It's just the way the cookie crumbles.' he added, with the sort of bullshit 'I share your suffering' expression an undertaker might give to one of his customer's relatives. Tomboy Darke was my business partner and a man with a cliche for every occasion, including murder.” - Simon Kernick

20. “Kara knew je only recognised t and a on a string and he was nothing more than a sleazy pupeeter” - Saira Viola

21. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ . . .The land is flat, the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.” - Truman Capote

22. “He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.” - Andrew Vachss

23. “For one… If you shoot me and your boss realizes it was without good reason, you’ll have fucked up your trial period. And trust me; I know you’re still in it.” Ian pulled open a drawer in a small brown cabinet.“Secondly, it could end very badly for me and I’d rather prevent that. Getting shot is not on my list of things to do today.” He wrapped his hand around the steel grip of his own weapon and removed it from the drawer.“And last but not least, if you plan to shoot me… Well, it’ll be a matter of which of us is quicker and has better aim.” A pleasant smile crossed his features and he casually waved the gun from side to side. “Do you want to risk it?” - Natasha McNeely

24. “I needed to know, Jesse. I needed to get inside his head. To find this son of a bitch, I need to get inside his head.” - Stephanie Carovella” - Nina D'Angelo

25. “There are two kinds of people who sit around all day thinking about killing people...mystery writers and serial killers. I'm the kind that pays better.” - Richard Castle

26. “He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.” - Barry N. Malzberg

27. “Al... You ever kill anybody? In the United States? Because I know you mean it and everything, but I know these guys better than I know you. They're soldiers, that's all. No questions, no time to ask, no talk. Cops are worse, and less predictable. When you pull a gun, you've gotta be ready to kill somebody, and I'm telling you it's better to run.” - Phillip Rock

28. “Al Hickey: It's not about anything. Frank Boggs: Yeah, it's about four hundred grand” - Phillip Rock

29. “In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.” - Kate Atkinson

30. “Either I’ve got a wart on my nose they find curious, or I’ve grown a tail, Albie Merani muttered to himself. Just then he thought. I’d better get a move on, got work to do. He hurried across to some stairs, heading down deeper into station, then followed the signs to the pod station.” - Rw Rivers

31. “Everything begins with chioce.” - s j wardell

32. “Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm.” - Tom Vater

33. “My inner goddess confirms that staring at a beautiful/rich/powerful face is the basis of True Love.” - Jess C. Scott

34. “Because I want to have sex with him--and because that's sinful--I'm blushing and flushing furiously under his scrutinizing scrutiny.” - Jess C. Scott

35. “You ever choke a man out with his own shirt?”“What kind of question is that?”“A yes or no one.” - Todd Morr

36. “Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.Murder in the Dog Park” - Jill Yesko

37. “Emilia typed in her password and checked her inbox. A review by the Secretariat de Gobernación of drug cartel activities across Mexico. A report of a robbery in Acapulco’s poorest barrio neighborhood that would probably never be investigated. Notice of a reward for a child kidnapped in Ixtapa who was almost certainly dead by now. Her phone rang. It was the desk sergeant saying that a Señor Rooker wished to see her. Emilia avoided Rico’s eye as she said, yes, the sergeant could let el señor pass into the detectives’ area.A minute later Rucker was standing by her desk, sweat beaded on his forehead. The starched collar of his shirt was damp. “There’s a head,” he said breathlessly. “Someone’s head in a bucket on the hood of my car.” - Carmen Amato

38. “Hascomb snatched an ancient weapon out of his glove compartment. Officers have smuggled them home from the last five wars. The Colt.45 automatic.” - John D. MacDonald

39. “False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all.” - Chris Womersley

40. “The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")” - Francis M. Nevins

41. “Foreign food isn’t really my thing. I tasted whale once, and I was sick for a week.” - Steen Langstrup

42. “I covered the body with a rug. You think I’m an idiot?”Bruno HansonIn The Shadow of Sadd.” - Steen Langstrup

43. “And what is corruption, I ask you? Who gets hurt if a poor cop gets a new car or a week’s vacation in Kenya for letting the Baltic girls earn a living in peace, down on the docks? I mean, where’s the harm in that?”Police Officer on Radio Fake 112.8 MHzIn The Shadow of Sadd.” - Steen Langstrup

44. “Those Zolofts make me so fucking hungry. I’ve gained 20 pounds – it’s totally out of control.”George HansonIn The Shadow of Sadd.” - Steen Langstrup

45. “Fuck!” he shouts. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”“I’m not too fucking fond of loud noises, Bruno. Maybe it’d be a good idea if you backed up to the curb and got your insurance papers ready. We wouldn’t want the police to get involved, would we?”Conversation between Bruno Hanson and George HansonIn The Shadow of Sadd.” - Steen Langstrup

46. “The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves” - Mike Bartos

47. “That crap about doing something with your life are luxury problems. People like us have to play by a different rules.” #ShadowofSadd #Books” - Steen Langstrup

48. “All that crap about love and fairness and doing something with your life, Bruno ... Those are luxury problems. The CEO’s wife can go around worrying about that stuff. People like us from the projects have to play by a different set of rules.”George HansonIn The Shadow of Sadd” - Steen Langstrup

49. “A closed mouth gathers no feet.” - Harrod-Eagles

50. “He was one of those men who can both get money and keep it. He must have been a millionaire. He kept accounts. He introduced a post-office atmosphere into his shady dealings. Not a stamp, not a pen-nib escaped him, and he would stay up half the night to figure out what had happened to a mislaid farthing. You cannot conceive the caution and the meanness of that man! He would have made a Syrian pawn-broker appear like Diamond Jim Brady. But he had brains, and also nerve. At the same time, he was as smooth as glycerine. He looked like an octopus — he had a dirtyish pallor, no shape, evil eyes, and a beak. In shaking hands with him, you felt that six or seven other hands were investigating your pockets while a dozen eyes watched you. He was feared. He made money out of everything. But he was still unknown to the police.” - Gerald Kersh

51. “I thought about taking a course in painting. I was good at drawing in school, you remember?”“You never went to school.”Conversation between Bruno Hanson and George HansonIn The Shadow of Sadd.” - Steen Langstrup

52. “The Professor is coming...” - M Hopkins

53. “His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with terror not dissipated but omnipresent, like God.("Introduction")” - Francis M. Nevins

54. “All we can do about this nightmare we live in is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich excels at making us watch while relationships corrode. He knew the horrors that both love and lovelessness can breed, yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; for with whoever loves or needs love, Woolrich identifies, all of that person's dark side notwithstanding.("Introduction")” - Francis M. Nevins

55. “When he shows I’ll say: ‘Good day, a bouquet for Mr. Hovgaard.’ Then you shoot him. Understood?”Ingrid aka ‘Alis K’The Informer” - Steen Langstrup

56. “My name’s Alis K. From now on you will be Willy. Come on, let’s push the bicycles for a bit.”Ingrid aka ‘Alis K’The Informer” - Steen Langstrup

57. “Sneaking out at night. You think you’re so clever, but you’re not. Either you’re a saboteur, Johannes, or you’ve got a mistress.”The Reverend’s wife, GreteThe Informer” - Steen Langstrup

58. “I just can’t comprehend, that you, Borge, of all people, couldn’t keep your mouth shut.” - Steen Langstrup

59. “You’ll be very close to him when you shoot him. So shove the pistol in his face and pull the trigger instantly.”Ingrid aka ‘Alis K’The Informer” - Steen Langstrup

60. “Captain Crawford didn't like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose techniques that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I'd gotten the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to a pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck.” - Leslie Ford

61. “We saved the lives of a whole family that night. Children, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, all sailed to safety in Sweden inside a little fisherman’s boat.”Johannes aka ‘BB’The Informer by Steen Langstrup” - Steen Langstrup

62. “One of the two owners, the man who had been sitting in the front room, was stretched out in there asleep, stockinged-toes pointed at the ceiling, one hand backed defensively against his eyes to ward off the light. He'd taken off his vest and shoes, and that strap that wasn't straight enough to be a suspender-strap was dangling now around one of the knobs at the foot of the bed. It ended in a holster, with a black, cross-grained slab of metal protruding from it. Turner couldn't take his eyes off it, while the long seconds that to him were minutes toiled by.That meant out, that black slab, more surely than any door. He had to have it. More than that, it meant a continuance of out, for so long as he had it. And he wanted out with all the desperate longing of all trapped things, blindly scratching, clawing their way through a maze to the open. To the open where the equal chance is.” - Cornell Woolrich

63. “The remaining chain swung down, he wrenched the door out and he was free. The last thing he heard behind him was the oncoming stomp of running feet.Now began flight, that excruciating accompaniment to both the sleep-dream and the drug-dream as well. Down endless flights of stairs that seemed to have increased decimally since he had come up them so many days before. Four, fourteen, forty - there seemed no end to them, no bottom. Round and round he went, hand slapping at the worn guard-rail only at the turns to keep from bulleting head-on into the wall each time. The clamor had come out onto a landing high above him now, endless miles above him; a thin voice came shouting down the stair-well, "There he is! See him down there?" raising the hue and cry to the rest of the pack. Footsteps started cannonading down after him, like avenging thunder from on high. They only added wings to his effortless, almost cascading waterlike flight.Like a drunk, he was incapable of hurting himself. At one turning he went off his feet and rippled down the whole succeeding flight of stair-ribs like a wriggling snake. Then he got up again and plunged ahead, without consciousness of pain or smart. The whole staircase-structure seemed to hitch crazily from side to side with the velocity of his descent, but it was really he that was hitching. But behind him the oncoming thunder kept gaining.Then suddenly, after they'd kept on for hours, the stairs suddenly ended, he'd reached bottom at last. He tore out through a square of blackness at the end of the entrance-hall, and the kindly night received him, took him to itself - along with countless other things that stalk and kill and are dangerous if crossed.He had no knowledge of where he was; if he'd ever had, he'd lost it long ago. The drums of pursuit were still beating a rolling tattoo inside the tenement. He chose a direction at random, fled down the deserted street, the wand of light from a wan street-lamp flicking him in passing, so fast did he scurry by beneath it.” - Cornell Woolrich

64. “His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers.” - Cornell Woolrich

65. “There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them.” - Cornell Woolrich