Rex Stout Quotes

#1. The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a team generally regarded as seeking justice, can be compared to the adventures of Rex Stout's two most famous characters, Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin.

James Grady

#2. Currently he was going through the entire Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout, He'd just finished Murder by the Book and was in the process of downloading Triple Jeopardy to his e-reader when the alarm went off.

Keith R.A. DeCandido

#3. Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.

P.G. Wodehouse

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#8. 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

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

Rex Stout

#10. Fritz giggled. He's the only man I've ever known who could giggle without giving you doubts about his fundamentals.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#12. Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating.

Rex Stout

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Rex Stout

#16. 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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#18. 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

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

Rex Stout

#20. Okay, Dolly Brooke killed her because she was going to marry a quote nigger unquote, and how do we prove it?'
He frowned. 'I have told you not to use that word in my hearing.'
'I was merely quoting. It isn't - '
'Shut up. I mean the word 'unquote' and you know it.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#23. 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.

Rex Stout

#24. Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#26. 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.

Rex Stout

#27. 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

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

Rex Stout

#29. I could have told, just looking at him, that that was the tone he would use asking a question. A tone that took it for granted any question he asked was going to be answered because he asked it. I don't like it and I know of no way anybody is ever going to make me like it.

Rex Stout

#30. 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

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

Rex Stout

#32. Loyalty is a very fine thing, but it shouldn't be allowed to get the bit between its teeth. I

Rex Stout

#33. 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

#34. Yes, I said something to him, and then I cooled him off." "Cooled? By what process?" "I knocked him halfway across Broadway and took my wife." "You did?" Wolfe scowled at him. "What's the matter with your brain? Does it leak?

Rex Stout

#35. 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

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

Rex Stout

#37. A pig whose diet is fifty to seventy percent peanuts grows a ham of incredibly sweet and delicate succulence which, well-cured, well-kept and well-cooked, will take precedence over any other ham the world affords.

Rex Stout

#38. Opinions, from experts, cost money.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#40. If he had married Mrs. Albert Grantham for her money I freely admit that no man marries without a reason and with her it would have been next to impossible to think up another one ...

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. Archie.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Do I ever intrude in your private affairs?'
'Yes, sir. Frequently. But you think you don't, so go right ahead.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#47. 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

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

Rex Stout

#49. 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

#50. Only the man that knows to little, knows too much. Nero Wolfe

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#52. To drink champagne with a blonde at one elbow and a brunette at the other gives a man a sense of well-being, and

Rex Stout

#53. Well." Wolfe was judicious. "You were not under oath. The police have been lied to informally many times by many people, including me. The right to lie in the service of your own interests is highly valued and frequently exercised.

Rex Stout

#54. There has never been a smoother operation since Whosis scattered the dust on the temple floor.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#57. 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

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#60. Mysteries are like cayenne for the brain. The senses do pick up. Who was Jack the Ripper? Who killed Judge Crater? How did I burn through my paycheck so fast? Such questions can intrigue or infuriate, but the mind snaps to attention. from the Introduction

Rex Stout

#61. 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

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

Rex Stout

#63. You can't base your actions on the theory that anyone you don't keep your eye on is apt to get killed.

Rex Stout

#64. 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

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

Rex Stout

#66. [T]he human equipment includes, for instance, a capacity for personal affection and a willingness to strangle selfish and predatory impulse with the rope of social decency.

Rex Stout

#67. 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

#68. All there was to it, he was in a panic. He was scared stiff that any minute a fact might come bouncing in that would force him to send me down to Cramer bearing gifts, and there was practically nothing on earth he wouldn't rather do, even eating ice cream with cantaloupe or horseradish on oysters.

Rex Stout

#69. 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.

Rex Stout

#70. They say it works sometimes, but even if it does, how could you depend on anything you got that way? Not to mention that after you did it a few times any decent garbage can would be ashamed to have you found in it.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#72. Is all this necessary?" Bowen wanted to know. "Perhaps not," Wolfe allowed, "but I'm exposing a murderer and claim a measure of indulgence. You must have expected to spend hours here. Am I tedious?" "Go ahead.

Rex Stout

#73. 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

#74. 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.

Rex Stout

#75. 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.

Rex Stout

#76. 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

#77. 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

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#80. He growled. "You know quite well that that locution is vile.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#82. 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

#83. He threw up his hands and waved them around, and shook all over, and laughed as if he never expected to hear a joke again and would use it all up on this one.

Rex Stout

#84. Good heavens." Wolfe pushed back his chair, not of course with violence, but with determination. "Archie. Understand this. As a man of action you are tolerable, you are even competent. But I will not for one moment put up with you as a psychologist. I

Rex Stout

#85. Nothing is quite so uncomfortable as a loose conscience.

Rex Stout

#86. 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 ...

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#88. He does not admit this, but no man is so poor that he cannot afford a what if ...

Rex Stout

#89. 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

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

Rex Stout

#91. To assert dignity is to lose it.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#93. 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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#95. Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.

Rex Stout

#96. 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

#97. 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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

#99. 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

#100. 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