True Crime Quotes

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

'Murder in the First' takes 12 episodes to explore the crime and the issues surrounding it, all in the hopes of answering the question, 'How did we get to this point?'

'Intrigue: Murder In The Lucky Holiday Hotel' is a podcast put together by the BBC's Carrie Gracie that investigates the story behind the death of British businessman Neil Heywood in the Chinese city of Chongqing in 2011.

'Cold Case Files' and similar shows do bang up business, which points to a certain thirst for details in the viewership, but it seems like all the news chat shows continue to force the myth that Americans can't stand detail and have no interest in an idea that can't fit on a bumper sticker.

I will live in TV Land watching 'Columbo.' I also like my 'Forensic Files,' all of that true crime.

I read true crime books, and I read when people do case studies of stuff. I'm into books like that. Case studies or forensics or murder - all that good stuff.

Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.

I grew up reading crime fiction mysteries, true crime - a lot of true crime - and it is traditionally a male dominated field from the outside, but from the inside what we know, those of us who read it, is that women buy the most crime fiction, they are by far the biggest readers of true crime, and there's a voracious appetite among women for these stories, and I know I feel it - since I was quite small I wanted to go to those dark places.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

'Not A Love Story' is inspired by true events, but it is not based on those events completely. When I first read about the Maria Susairaj case, I was fascinated with the psychological aspects, that two seemingly very ordinary people can go completely berserk.

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

I knew Berlin would have to become a kind of character in my new book, 'In the Garden of Beasts'. I had felt likewise about Chicago when I wrote 'The Devil in the White City' and Galveston with 'Isaac's Storm'.

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.

I've always been a fan of books that create an interesting blend of fact and fiction - whether it's Norman Mailer, or 'The Short Timers,' or 'In Cold Blood.' I'm a fan of that genre.

I read a lot about serial killers.

Since 1966, hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction. Every serial killer, it seems, now has a biographer or two.

'O.J.: Made in America' was one of the best things I've seen in a long time.

'Strong Island' is not your typical true-crime film. It's not actually about the uncovering of evidence or following leads that hadn't been seen before or any of that stuff.

I lived around the man who was the model for Buffalo Bill in the movie 'Silence of the Lambs.'

I loved the book [The Adderall Diaries] I optioned it, I think some years ago. But there's a lot of different threads in the book. It starts off as one thing, where he's trying to cover this murder trial, and then his own life starts to impinge on that, so it becomes something else. I found that fascinating.

On TV, the nitty-gritty of trials takes place between commercial breaks, whereas, of course, reality is infinitely more complex. True crime also makes us more empathetic.

There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.

Maybe [killers] is one of my real passions. Why deny it?

Serious crime is very, very rare, and I think all of us are interested because they are rare and unusual. If they were banal and everyday, we wouldn't be interested in them at all.

I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.