Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

“I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the duncoloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material?”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Naval Treaty - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Did they know that Arthur Conan Doyle went on to investigate mysteries in his real life and absolved a man for a crime for which he has been convicted? Did they know how Agatha Christie brilliantly staged her own disappearance in order to exact an elegant revenge on a cheating husband? They probably did not. And no one was going to discount Stevie Bell, who had gotten into this school on the wings of her interest in the Ellingham case, and who had been a bystander at a death that was now looking more and more suspicious.”
― Maureen Johnson, Truly, Devious

“Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.”
― Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

“Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.”
― John Hodgman, That is All

“In the darkest corner of a darkened room, all Sherlock Homes stories begin. In the pregnant dim of gaslight and smoke, Holmes would sit, digesting the day's papers, puffing on his long pipe, injecting himself with cocaine. He would pop smoke rings into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to pierce into the belly of his study and release the promise of adventure; of clues to interpret; of, at last he would plead, a puzzle he could not solve. And after each story he would return here, into the dark room, and die day by day of boredom. The darkness of his study was his cage, but also the womb of his genius.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Conan Doyle deluded a century of readers into thinking we're all deductive geniuses.”
― Rob Thomas, Mr. Kiss and Tell

“Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualistm; it was not that Richard had any problems believing in ghosts - Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything - but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innoncent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes still may strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“... but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all." - Sherlock Holmes”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Twisted Lip - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Había nacido para ser grande, porque era capaz de proyectar lo que otros hombres no se atrevían a llevar a cabo, y de llevar a cabo lo que otros hombres no se atrevían a proyectar.
El caso de Lady Sannox”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“The vegetable kingdom still remains one of the few which Napoleon has not yet conquered.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Uncle Bernac

“I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I have ever come across: a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon. There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

-Sherlock Holmes”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“And he has guns and dogs that would make the Hound of Baskervilles seem like a bleeding Pekinese.”
― David Baldacci, Deliver Us from Evil

“Si un cometa chocara contra este montón de polvo nuestro y lo convirtiera en mil millones de fragmentos que salieran disparados hacia el espacio, si su ardiente aliento lamiera cada forma de vida como una polilla se marchita con una vela, todavía, al final de mil millones de años, la más diminuta partícula de nuestros cuerpos seguiría existiendo.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“Sir Arthur, I have devoted a lot of time and thought to this illusion ... I won’t tell you how it was done, but I can assure you it was pure trickery. I did it by perfectly normal means. I devised it to show you what can be done along these lines. Now, I beg of you, Sir Arthur, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily “supernatural,” or the work of “spirits,” just because you cannot explain them....”
― Harry Houdini

“He has spoiled my night's reading, and that's reason enough, if there were no other, why I should steer clear of him in the future.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Lot No. 249

“Aber ich verabscheute die stumpfsinnige Routine des Daseins. Ich sehne mich nach geistiger Erhebung.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes

“With the onset of World War I and the deaths of thousands of young men, a new generation of spiritualists appeared. One of the most prominent was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes detective series, whose pro-spiritualist book "New Revelation" was published in 1917.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“She is a writer, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes.”
― Petra Hermans