Quotes from Rex Stout

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

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." [ Life magazine, December 10, 1965]

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

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.

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

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

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 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him." [ An Invitation to Learning , January 1942]

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

Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.

She turned back to me, graceful as a big cat, straight and proud, not quite smiling, her warm dark eyes as curious as if she had never seen a man before. I knew damn well I ought to say something, but what? The only thing to say was "Will you marry me?" but that wouldn't do because the idea of her washing dishes or darning socks was preposterous.

What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.

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.

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." [ Life magazine, December 10, 1965]

To assert dignity is to lose it.

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.

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene. [ An Invitation to Learning , January 1942]

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. 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. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

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.

That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

Enforced courtesy is worse than none.

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes. (Nero Wolfe)

Everything in a story should be credible.

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

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.