Rex stout quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

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

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

Everything in a story should be credible.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

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.

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.

Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.

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

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

Opinions, from experts, cost money.

Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.

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.

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

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

The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

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

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.

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.

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