Rex Stout Quotes

Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia ...
... Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, "He's in a battle with the elements. He's fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That's the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination." I said aloud, "You mustn't go to sleep, sir, it's fatal. You freeze to death.

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

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

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

“Everything in a story should be credible.”

— Rex Stout

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

“Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.”

— Rex Stout

“I suspected the movies, considering her cheap crack about me being a ten-cent Clark Gable, which was ridiculous. He simpers, to begin with, and to end with no one can say I resemble a movie actor, and if they did it would be more apt to be Gary Cooper than Clark Gable.”

— Rex Stout

“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

“Wolfe: 'Our next step is obvious, but it must wait ... '
Archie: It was nice to know the next step was obvious, but it would have been even nicer to know what it was.”

— Rex Stout

Everything about her, the way she walked, the way she stood, her eyes and mouth and whole face, seemed to be saying, without trying or intending to, that if you happened to be hers, and she yours, life would be full of pleasant and interesting surprises.

— Rex Stout

“Fritz was standing there, four feet back from the door to the office, which was standing open, staring wide-eyed at me. When he saw I was looking at him he beckoned me to come, and the thought popped into my mind that, with guests present and Wolfe making an oration, that was precisely how Fritz would act if the house was on fire.”

— Rex Stout

“I have undertaken to to find an explanation for something that can't possibly be explained-Nero Wolfe”

— Rex Stout

“The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person, - Nero Wolfe”

— Rex Stout

“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

“When people's brains stop working, just go somewhere else. (Death of a Doxie)”

— Rex Stout

“He's sick." "What with?" "Sitzenlust. Chronic. The opposite of wanderlust.”

— Rex Stout

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

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.
Nero Wolf in Death of a Dude.

— Rex Stout

“Despite some initial reluctance to spend a whole book's worth of time with a man who flirted with misogyny, I took the plunge. Wolfe, after all, had the good sense to live in Manhattan, and besides, you had to like a man who surrounded himself with exotic tropical plants, consumed epicurean meals, and had the chutzpah to make the universe conform to his rules. And when I met Archie Goodwin, his ebullience and his earthy, rakish charm won me over.”

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

“Then she's the mother!" "No. For various good reasons, no. I won't-" "But she knows who the mother is!" "Probably she did. At least she knew where she got it and who from. But she won't tell because she's dead. She was-" "Dead?" "I'm telling you. After a short talk with her Friday morning I left to get to a phone and send for help, and when I got back to the house her car was gone and so was she. I spent three hours searching the house. I'm reporting only the details that you need to understand the situation. Ellen Tenzer never returned to her house. At six o'clock yesterday morning a cop found a dead woman in a parked car-here in Manhattan, Thirty-eighth Street near Third Avenue. She had been strangled with a piece of cord. It was Ellen Tenzer, and it was her car. You would know about that if you read the papers. So she can't tell us anything.”

— Rex Stout

“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

“Old Time is never discreet or tactful.”

— Rex Stout

“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

“But Mr. Cramer,." Wolfe protested, "is it my fault if destiny likes this address?”

— Rex Stout

“He looked at her. That was the first time I had seen him give her a direct and explicit look, and, since she was just off the line from him to me, I had a good view of it. It demolished one detail of his exposition-the claim that a man of his training and temperament couldn't possibly commit a murder. His look at her was perfect for a guy about to put a cord around a neck and pull tight. It was just one swift, ugly flash, and then he returned to Wolfe.”

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

“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

“The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.”

— Rex Stout

“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

“As between the intolerable and the merely distasteful, I must choose the latter.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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