Rex Stout Quotes

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.

I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.

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.

A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.

Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.

I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.

I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is a hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity.

No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.

Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.

I don't answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

There are damn few great writers and I'm not one of them. While I could afford to I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.

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

The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

There are two kinds of statistics the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

To assert dignity is to lose it.

Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.

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

Yeah. I'm the fly in the soup. I don't like it any better than you do. Flies don't like being swamped in soup, especially when it's hot.

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try." -- Nero Wolf in Death of a Dude.

...if he had married Mrs. Albert Grantham for her money I freely admit that no man marries without a reason and with her it would have been next to impossible to think up another one....