Rex Stout Quotes
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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.
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What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.
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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.
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MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
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It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.
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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.
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There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
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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.
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There's nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.
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Everything in a story should be credible.
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[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.
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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.
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No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.
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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off
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A hole in the ice is dangerous only to those who go skating.
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God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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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.
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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.