Best 92 quotes of Rex Stout on MyQuotes

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.

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.

Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

Everything in a story should be credible.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

Opinions, from experts, cost money.

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.

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.