Quotes from Rex Stout

Sometimes it's things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you're hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you're in a hurry, but usually it's people.

I like to walk around Manhattan, catching glimpses of its wild life, the pigeons and cats and girls.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

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

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.

To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.

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.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it.

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

I love to make a mistake. It is my only assurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the responsibility of omniscience.

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

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

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.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

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

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

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.

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

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous

The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs. Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking.