Rex Stout Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rex Stout
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...

Rex Stout
Statistics show that seventy-four per cent of wives open letters, with or without a teakettle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rex Stout
There are numerous layers of honesty, and the deepest should not have a monopoly.

Rex Stout
What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damn 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