Quotes from Rex Stout

He wrote short and he wrote often, which tended to obscure the fact that he wrote well. Unless it leads to obscurity, brevity is rarely praised (or employed) in the journals of, ah, serious literary criticism, and frequency is often equated with frivolity.

Yes, I said something to him, and then I cooled him off." "Cooled? By what process?" "I knocked him halfway across Broadway and took my wife." "You did?" Wolfe scowled at him. "What's the matter with your brain? Does it leak?

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.

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

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.

I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.

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

Invade a man's privacy and then put the burden on him.

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

I wouldn't use physical violence even if I could, because one of my romantic ideas is that physical violence is beneath the dignity of a man, and that whatever you get by physical aggression costs more than it is worth.

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.

When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn't occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.

To drink champagne with a blonde at one elbow and a brunette at the other gives a man a sense of well-being, and

It is indubitable that Carol Mardus was the mother of the baby left in Mrs. Valdon's vestibule and that she was gravely disquieted to learn that I knew it and could demonstrate it.

The police are not witlings; they will know that each of you may have had a private reason for your reserve not relevant to their investigation; but they will also know that if one of you was involved with Carol Mardus regarding the baby, and if you killed Ellen Tenzer, you would certainly have omitted her name from your list and you would not have identified the picture. So they will be importunate with all of you.

It would take an extremely unattractive person to think of that." --Nero Wolfe, on the plot of "Cordially Invited to Meet Death" by Rex Stout, p. 159 of 192

I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of the human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it.

Can Mr. Wolfe help it if an attractive young fellow insists on coming to cry on his shoulder?

Nevertheless, it was not necessary to assume, as Wolfe had in the case of Viola Duday, that if he had killed Priscilla Eads he had probably done so by contrivance and not by perpetration. In spite of his pure white hair and wrinkled old skin, I would have bet, from the way he looked and moved and held his shoulders and head, that he could still have chinned himself up to five or six times.

Though I suppose you've changed your mind, now that there's a woman sleeping in your bed—" "Nonsense. My bed—" "You own all the beds in this house except mine, don't you? Certainly it's your bed.

A pig whose diet is fifty to seventy percent peanuts grows a ham of incredibly sweet and delicate succulence which, well-cured, well-kept and well-cooked, will take precedence over any other ham the world affords.

it is our good fortune that the exigencies of birth and training furnish all of us with the opportunities for snobbery.

As sure as my name is Archie and not Archibald, I would have shot that goddamn orangutan dead in his tracks.

The back-seat driving of the less charitable emotions often makes me wonder that the brain does not desert the wheel entirely, in righteous exasperation. Not