Rex Stout Quotes

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

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.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

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

Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.

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

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.

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

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.

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

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.

Everything in a story should be credible.

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

A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

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

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

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

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.

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

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

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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