Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by Rex Stout

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Rex Stout.

Last updated on September 18, 2024.

Rex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels and 39 novellas between 1934 and 1975.

American - Writer | December 1, 1886 - October 27, 1975

Source: Wikipedia

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

Rex Stout

Everything in a story should be credible.

Rex Stout

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

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

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

Rex Stout

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

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.

Rex Stout

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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.

Rex Stout

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

Rex Stout

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote

Rex Stout

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

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

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.

Rex Stout

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

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.

Rex Stout

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

A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

Rex Stout

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

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.

Rex Stout

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

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

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

Rex Stout

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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

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.

Rex Stout

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

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

Rex Stout

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

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

Rex Stout

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

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.

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout

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

Rex Stout