Rex Stout Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that 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 had first noticed her in the lobby of the Churchill, because she rated a glance as a matter of principle—the principle that a man owes it to his eyes to let them rest on attractive objects when there are any around.

Rex Stout
My God you love to get them, and good Lord you hate to answer them.

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

Rex Stout
It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene.

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

Rex Stout
I really mean what I say. 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.

Rex Stout
Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damn 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
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 trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off

Rex Stout
There are various ways to call a man a liar. One way is just to scream it at him, which doesn't prove anything. Another is to establish facts by long and patient investigation. Still another way is not to call him a liar at all — let him do it himself.

Rex Stout
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.

Rex Stout
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
I saw every performance Nijinsky danced in New York, and I see every baseball game I can get to. You watch a good second baseman digging for a badly thrown ball without letting his foot leave base and it's the same beautiful impossibility as a good pas de deux in Swan Lake.

Rex Stout
A pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

Rex Stout
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
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
Everyone has something they don't want anyone to see; that is one of the functions of a home, to provide a spot to keep such things.

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
There isn't a generation gap between you and me — there's two.

Rex Stout