Quotes from Rex Stout

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

To say that a 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Opinions, from experts, cost money.

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

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.

Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.

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.

Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating.

Yeah. I'm the fly in the soup. I don't like it any better than you do. Flies don't like being swamped in soup, especially when it's hot.

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.

When I consider myself superior to anyone, as I frequently do, I need a better reason than his skin.

A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

Wolfe could get sentimental about it if he wanted to, but I don't like any stranger nosing around my private affairs, let alone a nation of 130 million people.-Archie Goodwin

All there was to it, he was in a panic. He was scared stiff that any minute a fact might come bouncing in that would force him to send me down to Cramer bearing gifts, and there was practically nothing on earth he wouldn't rather do, even eating ice cream with cantaloupe or horseradish on oysters.

Only the man that knows to little, knows too much." Nero Wolfe

Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.

You know what my boss says? He says that skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take the leash off.

As long as I live I'll never forget the time he had a bank president pinched, or rather I did, on no evidence whatever except that the fountain pen on his desk was dry. I was never so relieved in my life as when the guy shot himself an hour later.