Top 150 Rex Stout Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Wolfe regarded him. “Either, sir, you’re an ass or you’re masquerading as one. When there is evidence that you have murdered, there will be not a suspicion but a conviction. If I had evidence that one or more of you is guilty I wouldn’t sit here half the night, inviting you to jabber; I would phone the police to come and get you. Have you anything to say?”

— Rex Stout

52. “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.”

— Rex Stout

53. “I have a strong moral sense – by my standards.”

— Rex Stout

54. “I wouldn’t use physical violence even if I could, because one of my romantic ideas is that physical violence is beneath the dignity of a man, and that whatever you get by physical aggression costs more than it is worth.”

— Rex Stout

55. “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

56. “Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.”

— Rex Stout

57. “At first, yes. But a long intimacy frees you of that illusion, and it also acquaints you with their scantiness of character. The effect they have produced on you is only their bluff. There is not such a thing as too much beauty.”

— Rex Stout

58. “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

59. “No man with any sense assumes that a woman’s words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.”

— Rex Stout

60. “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.”

— Rex Stout

61. “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.”

— Rex Stout

62. “I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn’t do what you said she would.”

— Rex Stout

63. “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

64. “You know what my boss says? He says that skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take the leash off.”

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

66. “The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs. Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking...”

— Rex Stout

67. “As sure as my name is Archie and not Archibald, I would have shot that goddamn orangutan dead in his tracks.”

— Rex Stout

68. “There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions – is he tall, is he short? – he had better quit.”

— Rex Stout

69. “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.”

— Rex Stout

70. “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.”

— Rex Stout

71. “Probably my conception of a widow was formed in my early boyhood in Ohio, from a character called Widow Rowley, who lived across the street. I have known others since, but the conception has not been entirely obliterated, so there is always an element of shock when I meet a female who has been labeled widow and I find that she has some teeth, does not constantly mutter to herself, and can walk without a cane.”

— Rex Stout

72. “The police are not witlings; they will know that each of you may have had a private reason for your reserve not relevant to their investigation; but they will also know that if one of you was involved with Carol Mardus regarding the baby, and if you killed Ellen Tenzer, you would certainly have omitted her name from your list and you would not have identified the picture. So they will be importunate with all of you.”

— Rex Stout

73. “I still can’t decide which is more fun – reading or writing.”

— Rex Stout

74. “What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.”

— Rex Stout

75. “You can’t tolerate a decent and swift conclusion to a skirmish between an individual and what you call society, as long as you have it in your power to turn it into a ghastly and prolonged struggle; the victim must squirm like a worm in your fingers, not for ten minutes, but for ten months. Pfui! I don’t like the law. It was not I, but a great philosopher, who said that the law is an ass.”

— Rex Stout

76. “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!”

— Rex Stout

77. “The brain can be hoodwinked but not the stomach.”

— Rex Stout

78. “He expressed appreciation for the information I provided, taking a dozen pages of notes in his small neat hand, and asking plenty of questions, not to challenge but just to elucidate. He did offer a pointed comment about what he called our dodge with Helmar, with his ward upstairs, and I rebutted.”

— Rex Stout

79. “If you collected all the good faith in this room right now you might fill a teaspoon.”

— Rex Stout

80. “I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.”

— Rex Stout

81. “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.”

— Rex Stout

82. “The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.”

— Rex Stout

83. “Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.”

— Rex Stout

84. “His reaction was humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable. As if we had rehearsed it a dozen times, he arose without a word, got his hat and stick from a nearby table, came and gave me a pat on the shoulder, growled at the audience, “A paradise for puerility,” and turned and headed for the door. I followed. No one moved to intercept us.”

— Rex Stout

85. “You know, that idea could be developed into a first-rate little article. Six hundred to seven hundred words, about. The Tyranny of the Wheel, you could call it, with a colored margin of trains and airplanes and ocean liners at top speed – of course liners don’t have wheels, but you could do something about that – if I could persuade you, Mr. Wolfe –.”

— Rex Stout

86. “I looked at the woman next to Bernard Quest on his left. She was middle-aged, with a scrawny neck and dominating ears, and was unquestionably a rugged individualist, since no lipstick had been allowed anywhere near her.”

— Rex Stout

87. “The back-seat driving of the less charitable emotions often makes me wonder that the brain does not desert the wheel entirely, in righteous exasperation. Not.”

— Rex Stout

88. “To anyone seeing him but not knowing him, Saul Panzer was nothing but a little guy with a big nose who never quite caught up with his shaving.”

— Rex Stout

89. “I’m not hysterical.” “Of course you are. All women are. Their moments of calm are merely recuperative periods between outbursts. I.”

— Rex Stout

90. “As long as I live I’ll never forget the time he had a bank president pinched, or rather I did, on no evidence whatever except that the fountain pen on his desk was dry. I was never so relieved in my life as when the guy shot himself an hour later.”

— Rex Stout

91. “Women don’t require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.”

— Rex Stout

92. “I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.”

— Rex Stout

93. “Wolfe fluttered a hand. “It was distasteful to me, having to offer to take the money direct from you instead of through Mr. Helmar, but I felt you merited that consideration. I’m glad you contemn it as blackmail, since I like to pretend that I earn at least a fraction of what I collect; but the offer stands until ten in the morning, should you decide that you prefer it to this hide-and-seek.”

— Rex Stout

94. “I like to walk around Manhattan, catching glimpses of its wild life, the pigeons and cats and girls.”

— Rex Stout

95. “Nevertheless, it was not necessary to assume, as Wolfe had in the case of Viola Duday, that if he had killed Priscilla Eads he had probably done so by contrivance and not by perpetration. In spite of his pure white hair and wrinkled old skin, I would have bet, from the way he looked and moved and held his shoulders and head, that he could still have chinned himself up to five or six times.”

— Rex Stout

96. “The incredible thing happens at the beginning of the story always, you notice, not the end. A Sherlock Holmes story is never a trick story.”

— Rex Stout

97. “It was delightful; but on awakening this morning I felt so completely water-logged that with only myself to consider I would have remained in bed to await disintegration. Names battered at me: Archie Goodwin, Fritz Brenner, Theodore Horstmann; responsibilities; and I arose to resume my burden. Not that I complain; the responsibilities are mutual; but my share can be done only by me.”

— Rex Stout

98. “She marched across to his desk, extended a hand, and told him cordially, “You look exactly right! Just as I thought! I would – ” She broke it off because she was getting a deep freeze. He had moved no muscle, and the expression on his face, while not belligerent, was certainly not cordial. She drew back. He spoke. “I don’t shake hands with you because you might later think it an imposition. We’ll see. Sit down, Miss Eads.”

— Rex Stout

99. “Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.”

— Rex Stout

100. “The sight of a pretty girl provokes in him an overwhelming reaction of appreciation and approval, and correlatively his acquisitive instinct, but he has never married. Why not? Because he knows that if he had a wife, his reaction to pretty girls, now pure and frank and free, would not only be intolerably adulterated but would also be under surveillance and subject to restriction by authority. So the governor always stops him short of disaster.”

— Rex Stout