Rex Stout Quotes

#1. 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.

Rex Stout

#2. To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#4. 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.

Rex Stout

#5. Invade a man's privacy and then put the burden on him.

Rex Stout

#6. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

Rex Stout

#7. 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.

Rex Stout

#8. 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.

Rex Stout

#9. I'm not hysterical." "Of course you are. All women are. Their moments of calm are merely recuperative periods between outbursts. I

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#11. I decided that the only way to keep feminine intuition from sneaking through an occasional lucky stab was to stay away from women altogether, which wasn't practical.

Rex Stout

#12. Everything from war to picnics depends on the weather, as Wolfe remarked

Rex Stout

#13. Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

Rex Stout

#14. Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.

Rex Stout

#15. But when you're there, there you are, and

Rex Stout

#16. You know what my boss says? He says that skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take the leash off.

Rex Stout

#17. for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.

Rex Stout

#18. The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

Rex Stout

#19. The back-seat driving of the less charitable emotions often makes me wonder that the brain does not desert the wheel entirely, in righteous exasperation. Not

Rex Stout

#20. No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket or at least had been fooling around with timetables.

Rex Stout

#21. He's sick." "What with?" "Sitzenlust. Chronic. The opposite of wanderlust.

Rex Stout

#22. 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.

Rex Stout

#23. Off - it was a hot night. We got back after midnight." "In your car?" "No, Helen Weltz had let us take hers. She has a Jaguar." My brows went up, and I spoke. "A Jaguar," I told Wolfe,

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#25. 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.

Rex Stout

#26. I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

Rex Stout

#27. Cream is put in a cardboard container, and the container is put in a carton on a bed of dry ice, and chunks of dry ice are packed on both sides of it and on top.

Rex Stout

#28. This is the unluckiest day I've had since my rich uncle changed doctors.

Rex Stout

#29. The least offensive way of refusing a request is not to let it be made.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#31. 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.
[Life magazine, December 10, 1965]

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#33. A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

Rex Stout

#34. I think the police and the FBI are quite capable of sacrificing the rights of a private citizen to what they consider the public interest.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#36. 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 ...

Rex Stout

#37. Nothing is obvious in itself. Obviousness is subjective.

Rex Stout

#38. Wolfe grunted. "That's admirably specious, but drop it. I give you my word that I haven't the faintest notion of who killed Ellen Tenzer." Cramer eyed him. "Your word?" "Yes, sir.

Rex Stout

#39. Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.

Rex Stout

#40. 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.

Rex Stout

#41. When we turned right on Thirty-fifth Street our suffix came along. By the time we rolled to the curb in front of Wolfe's house there wasn't even hyphen between us.

Rex Stout

#42. More people saying what they believe would be a great improvement. Because I often do I am unfit for common intercourse.-Nero Wolfe in Blood Will Tell

Rex Stout

#43. He expressed appreciation for the information I provided, taking a dozen pages of notes in his small neat hand, and asking plenty of questions, not to challenge but just to elucidate. He did offer a pointed comment about what he called our dodge with Helmar, with his ward upstairs, and I rebutted.

Rex Stout

#44. Wolfe could get sentimental about it if he wanted to, but I don't like any stranger nosing around my private affairs, let alone a nation of 130 million people.-Archie Goodwin

Rex Stout

#45. Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.

Rex Stout

#46. To assert dignity is to lose it.

Rex Stout

#47. I was yelling at a dame with a frontage that would have made a good bookshelf.

Rex Stout

#48. Can Mr. Wolfe help it if an attractive young fellow insists on coming to cry on his shoulder?

Rex Stout

#49. 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!

Rex Stout

#50. He was as indignant and irritated as if he had been served a veal cutlet with an egg perched on it.

Rex Stout

#51. 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.

Rex Stout

#52. 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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#54. 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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#56. As long as I live I'll never forget the time he had a bank president pinched, or rather I did, on no evidence whatever except that the fountain pen on his desk was dry. I was never so relieved in my life as when the guy shot himself an hour later.

Rex Stout

#57. But he wouldn't find me in the office, sitting there like patience in the hoosegow.

Rex Stout

#58. 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.

Rex Stout

#59. I looked at the woman next to Bernard Quest on his left. She was middle-aged, with a scrawny neck and dominating ears, and was unquestionably a rugged individualist, since no lipstick had been allowed anywhere near her.

Rex Stout

#60. Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.
Nero Wolf in Death of a Dude.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#63. am quite aware that I bat close to a thousand on invitations to damsels only because I don't issue one unless the circumstances strongly indicate that it will be accepted.

Rex Stout

#64. I said it is vainglorious to reproach yourself for lack of omniscience. That is also true of omnipotence. Report in as you can.

Rex Stout

#65. When I consider myself superior to anyone, as I frequently do, I need a better reason than his skin.

Rex Stout

#66. But I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime rolled to.

Rex Stout

#67. Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

Rex Stout

#68. I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#71. Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#74. Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
(Nero Wolfe)

Rex Stout

#75. 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.

Rex Stout

#76. 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.

Rex Stout

#77. Nature has arranged that when you overcome a given inertia the resulting momentum is proportionate. If I were to begin borrowing money I would end by devising means of persuading the Secretary of the Treasury to lend me the gold reserve.

Rex Stout

#78. Enforced courtesy is worse than none.

Rex Stout

#79. 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.

Rex Stout

#80. It is indubitable that Carol Mardus was the mother of the baby left in Mrs. Valdon's vestibule and that she was gravely disquieted to learn that I knew it and could demonstrate it.

Rex Stout

#81. You are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment

Rex Stout

#82. 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.

Rex Stout

#83. 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.

Rex Stout

#84. When people's brains stop working, just go somewhere else. (Death of a Doxie)

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#87. To anyone seeing him but not knowing him, Saul Panzer was nothing but a little guy with a big nose who never quite caught up with his shaving.

Rex Stout

#88. The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#90. I have undertaken to to find an explanation for something that can't possibly be explained-Nero Wolfe

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#92. That's ill-advised. More, it's puerile.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#94. Everything in a story should be credible.

Rex Stout

#95. If you want to be contentious wait until you learn what you have to contend with. It works better that way.

Rex Stout

#96. It was quite conceivable that Miss Tenzer had aroused in some man, possibly Richard Valdon, the kind of reaction that is an important factor in the propagation of the species; in fact, in more men than one.

Rex Stout

#97. One rule is this: that if the risk of a transaction is very great it should not be considered at all, no matter what profit it offers if it is successful.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#99. When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn't occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout