Quotes About Clues

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly

I love facts and figures. It's like following a detective story, piecing together what's going on in the economy.

I've always been a fan of investigation shows.

Even the first year of 'Columbo,' 'Columbo' was Jesus Christ, No. 1, you know.

Every religion had clues in it, for the faiths of men contained the hopes, loves, wishes, and lives of the people who had believed them.

Eliminating someone from an investigation is just as important as getting a positive lead.

Police work is a question of piecing together tentative solutions. We have to make the gaps speak and the pieces tell us about things that have hidden meanings. We have to try to see through the events, turn them on their heads in order to set them on their feet.

slowly peel away all the extraneous layers. There are tracks and marks left at every crime scene, like shadows of the event itself. That's what you have to find.

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.

2. Then (something else we usually forget) "listen for the response." It helps, says Bede, to "actively listen." To turn over every stone in your search for clues to the response. These responses usually come in subtle ways—through

With our movies, you start off getting to know the characters in the way that you meet someone in real life, and then slowly, over time, you get little clues as to who they are. By the end there are still some mysteries, but hopefully you're starting to understand them more.

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.'

Bringing this man's murderer to justice was more important to Sebastian than he could begin to explain, even to himself.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.

Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.

It is important to know who killed Jack Kennedy and why.

Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation,' argues the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. 'Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.'72 When it comes to consumerism, perhaps the poverty that we aim to conceal lies in our neglected relationships with each other and with the living world.

All of us conceal in conversation clues to personality which we happily reveal on paper, because the added distance of writing lends protection and encourages the risks of intimacy.

Q: How do you tell when there's an elephant in the pit? A: Peanut shells on the floor.

The truth is, no one is like Columbo.

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.

The thriller is the cardinal twentieth-century form. All it, like the twentieth century, wants to know is: Who's Guilty?

Back in the Aerie she popped her lips percussively as she examined her booty. 'P-ilfering P-adgett's P-ockets Pr-oduces P-ossible P-ath to... to—' Well, clues and shit.