Rex Stout > Quotes

“We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.”
― Rex Stout, The Rubber Band

“[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”
― Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance

“Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.”
― Rex Stout, The Red Box

“I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.”
― Rex Stout, Might as Well Be Dead

“Genius is fine for the ignition spark, but to get there someone has to see that the radiator doesn't leak and no tire is flat.”
― Rex Stout, The Doorbell Rang

“Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”
― Rex Stout, The Doorbell Rang

“The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold -- if you have one.”
― Rex Stout

“Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia...
...Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, "He's in a battle with the elements. He's fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That's the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination." I said aloud, "You mustn't go to sleep, sir, it's fatal. You freeze to death.”
― Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

“A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.”
― Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

“I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know.
(Nero Wolfe)”
― Rex Stout, Please Pass the Guilt

“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]”
― Rex Stout

“MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.”
― Rex Stout

“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.”
― Rex Stout, Some Buried Caesar

“In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.”
― Rex Stout, Champagne for One

“There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”
― Rex Stout, Death of a Doxy

“Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.”
― Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

“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.”
― Rex Stout, The Red Box

“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.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Clients

“What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

“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]”
― Rex Stout

“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]”
― Rex Stout

“Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.”
― Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker

“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.”
― Rex Stout

“To assert dignity is to lose it.”
― Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

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

[An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]”
― Rex Stout

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

“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.”
― Rex Stout, Champagne for One

“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.”
― Rex Stout

“Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
(Nero Wolfe)”
― Rex Stout, Three Doors to Death

“Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating.”
― Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks