Quotes from Rex Stout

He's disgusted and suspicious. They had Gebert down there, slapping him around and squealing and yelling at him. If you're so sure violence is inferior technique, you should have seen that exhibition; it was wonderful. They say it works sometimes, but even if it does, how could you depend on anything you got that way? Not to mention that after you had done it a few times any decent garbage can would be ashamed to have you found in it. But

So I didn't like it, and I either had to lump it or bow out. I tossed a coin: heads I stick, tails I quit. It landed tails, but I had to veto it because I had already talked to Orrie Cather and he was coming at noon, and I had left messages for Fred Durkin and Saul Panzer. I tossed again, tails again. I tossed once more and it was heads, which settled it. I had to stick.

Contact is not a verb and I said be brief." "Yes, sir. The last time you told me that I looked it up in the dictionary and I certainly don't want to contradict you but it says contact is a verb. Transitive or intransitive." "Contact is not a verb under this roof.

Probably no man will ever corral truth, but Protagoras came closer to it than Plato.

No, Mr. Vardas, I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is an hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity. One of the prime ambitions of a jackass is to bray louder than any other jackass, and man is not Ã¢â'¬Â¦

am quite aware that I bat close to a thousand on invitations to damsels only because I don't issue one unless the circumstances strongly indicate that it will be accepted.

Confound it." He sighed clear down. "I was going to finish that book this evening. Now this infernal mishmash.

With everybody. Lots of them don't know it. Most of them up here wouldn't say that word, nigger, but they've got that word in them. Everybody. It's in them buried somewhere, but it's not dead. Some of them don't know they've got it and they wouldn't believe it, but it's there. That's what I knew I'd have to face when I sat there on the bed last night and tried to decide what to do.

That's one of the disadvantages of being poor, you don't dare kill anybody.

that culture was like money, it comes easiest to those who need it least.

If you like Anglo-Saxon, I belched. If you fancy Latin, I eructed. No matter which, I had known that Wolfe and Inspector Cramer would have to put up with it that evening, because that is always a part of my reaction to sauerkraut. I don't glory in it or go for a record, but neither do I fight it back. I want to be liked just for myself.

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.

I was having an experience that was not new to me. I had suddenly discovered that a decision had been made, by me, upon full consideration, without my knowing it.

He looked uncomfortable. He saw that a pencil on his desk was not in its proper place, and moved it, and studied it a while to decide if that was the best spot after all. At length he came back to me.

I asked if I could use the bathroom. She showed me, down the hall, and I went, though I really had nothing much to pass but the time, and on the way back there was an open door and I entered. A good detective doesn't have to be invited. There

The essence of sainthood is expiation.

and when Archie Goodwin wonders about anything he finds out.

man with his frontal lobes pushed back like that is unpredictable.

The passions smothered by modem civilization are doubly ferocious when awakened

It's the crop.

The Minister and the Choir Singer

Cramer said a word, loud, which I omit because I suspect that some of the readers of these reports are people like retired schoolteachers and den mothers.

Nothing is nonsense that is concerned with the vagaries of human conduct.

These smokes can take it, they're used to it.