Rex Stout Quotes

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

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.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

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

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

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

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

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

Everything in a story should be credible.

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

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

A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

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

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.

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

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

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