Rex Stout Quotations

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.

To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.

Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote

Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.

One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled.

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

All men are reasoning animals more than any other animal. They have a bigger brain and better brain. And we reason with our brain.

God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.

Sometimes it's things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you're hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you're in a hurry, but usually it's people.

There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.

No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.

War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.

It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.

I like to walk around Manhattan, catching glimpses of its wild life, the pigeons and cats and girls.

If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you're surprised if a National Chairman calls you to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you're not really surprised.

I love to make a mistake. It is my only assurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the responsibility of omniscience.

Opinions, from experts, cost money.

Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.

I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it.

Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.

The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs. Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking...

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there's always some reason to live another year. And I'd like to live another year so that Nixon won't be President. If he's re-elected I'll have to live another four years.

There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221½ B Baker Street and didn't find him.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.

What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.

The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.

The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!

I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.

I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness.

I don't answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.

All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.

Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damned fool or a hero, I don't know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that's that. When you write a play you've got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the ...

As between the intolerable and the merely distasteful, I must choose the latter.

Every book takes me from 35 to 41 days to write. I don't know why that is. I've tried to get it down to 30 or 31, depending on the length of the month, but it won't work. I don't drink while I'm writing because it fuddles my logical processes, but when I finish a book I go down to the kitchen and pour myself a big belt.

Everyone has something they don't want anyone to see; that is one of the functions of a home, to provide a spot to keep such things.

I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is a hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity.

A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.

Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter.

You can't dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art's sake, but it can't be cheerful.

No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia... ...Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, "He's in a battle with the elements. He's fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That's the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination." I said aloud, "You mustn't go to sleep, sir, it's fatal. You freeze to death." The League of Frightened Men

I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.

Genius is fine for the ignition spark, but to get there someone has to see that the radiator doesn't leak and no tire is flat.

What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

As I understand it, a born executive is a guy who, when anything difficult or unexpected happens, yells for somebody to come and help him.

Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know. (Nero Wolfe)

I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.

Wolfe scowled at her. I could see he was torn with conflicting emotions. A female in his kitchen was an outrage. A woman criticizing his or Fritz's cooking was an insult. But corned beef hash was one of life's toughest problems, never yet solved by anyone.

No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.

I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn't do what you said she would.

There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living — cook books and detective stories.

There's nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.

The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off

Sarcasm is not the rapier of wit its wielders seem to believe it to be, but merely a club: it may, by dint of brute force, occasionally raise bruises, but it never cuts or pierces.

To say that a man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.

Bosh. I find a rival - but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner - I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you...

Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones.

The incredible thing happens at the beginning of the story always, you notice, not the end. A Sherlock Holmes story is never a trick story.

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.

A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold -- if you have one.

Everything in a story should be credible.

A hole in the ice is dangerous only to those who go skating.

The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.

[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.

The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.