Rex Stout
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.
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.
One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled.
I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.
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.
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.
Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.
Everything in a story should be credible.
Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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.
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.
To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.
The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.Collection: Book
Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.Collection: Writing
[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.Collection: Pleasant Surprises
The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes offCollection: Alarms
Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.Collection: Broke
The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.Collection: Brain
It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.Collection: Choices
No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Thinking
The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.Collection: Book
Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.Collection: Waste
No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.Collection: Women
There's nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.Collection: Ignorance
A hole in the ice is dangerous only to those who go skating.Collection: Ice
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.Collection: Sweet
A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitalityCollection: Jewels
A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.Collection: Men
I love to make a mistake. It is my only assurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the responsibility of omniscience.Collection: Mistake
Sarcasm is not the rapier of wit its wielders seem to believe it to be, but merely a club: it may, by dint of brute force, occasionally raise bruises, but it never cuts or pierces.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Thinking
Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.Collection: Never Quit
If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you're surprised if a National Chairman calls you to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you're not really surprised.Collection: Party
What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.Collection: Running
There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.Collection: Earth
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.Collection: Summer
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." The League of Frightened MenCollection: Drinking
I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!Collection: Book
I think the detective story is by far the best upholder of the democratic doctrine in literature. I mean, there couldn't have been detective stories until there were democracies, because the very foundation of the detective story is the thesis that if you're guilty you'll get it in the neck and if you're innocent you can't possibly be harmed. No matter who you are.Collection: Mean
The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.Collection: Opportunity
MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.Collection: Mean
In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.Collection: World
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.Collection: Thinking
Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones.Collection: Stories