Top 150 Rex Stout Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.”

— Rex Stout

102. “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.”

— Rex Stout

103. “I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of the human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it.”

— Rex Stout

104. “I got the address from her, and by good luck it wasn’t Bucyrus, Ohio, but merely Brooklyn. Whatever else you want to say about Brooklyn, and so do I, it does have one big advantage, it’s close.”

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

106. “Wolfe scowled at her. I could see he was torn with conflicting emotions. A female in his kitchen was an outrage. A woman criticizing his or Fritz’s cooking was an insult. But corned beef hash was one of life’s toughest problems, never yet solved by anyone.”

— Rex Stout

107. “Enforced courtesy is worse than none.”

— Rex Stout

108. “He looked at her. That was the first time I had seen him give her a direct and explicit look, and, since she was just off the line from him to me, I had a good view of it. It demolished one detail of his exposition – the claim that a man of his training and temperament couldn’t possibly commit a murder. His look at her was perfect for a guy about to put a cord around a neck and pull tight. It was just one swift, ugly flash, and then he returned to Wolfe.”

— Rex Stout

109. “Is all this necessary?” Bowen wanted to know. “Perhaps not,” Wolfe allowed, “but I’m exposing a murderer and claim a measure of indulgence. You must have expected to spend hours here. Am I tedious?” “Go ahead.”

— Rex Stout

110. “What that bird would have done with a couple of Martinis under his fur would have been something to watch from an airplane.”

— Rex Stout

111. “His oratorical baritone was raspy and supercilious under the strain. “You say you are not interested,” he told Wolfe, “in the factors of means and opportunity. The motive is palpable for all of us, but it is also palpable that Miss Duday is biased by animus. She cannot support her statement that after June thirtieth my income from the corporation would have ceased. I deny that Miss Eads intended to take any action so ill advised and irresponsible.”

— Rex Stout

112. “Though I suppose you’ve changed your mind, now that there’s a woman sleeping in your bed – ” “Nonsense. My bed – ” “You own all the beds in this house except mine, don’t you? Certainly it’s your bed.”

— Rex Stout

113. “He threw up his hands and waved them around, and shook all over, and laughed as if he never expected to hear a joke again and would use it all up on this one.”

— Rex Stout

114. “Helmar took his time replying. Finally he said, “I’ll reserve my answer to that.” “I doubt if aging will help it,” Wolfe said dryly. “Now that you know that Miss Eads had not gone to Venezuela, and I assure you she had no intention of going, how do you explain her backing out from her appointment with you, her departure, her asking you not to try to find her?” “I don’t have to explain it.”

— Rex Stout

115. “If you want to be contentious wait until you learn what you have to contend with. It works better that way.”

— Rex Stout

116. “Can Mr. Wolfe help it if an attractive young fellow insists on coming to cry on his shoulder?”

— Rex Stout

117. “There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.”

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

119. “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.”

— Rex Stout

120. “He growled. “You know quite well that that locution is vile.”

— Rex Stout

121. “The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.”

— Rex Stout

122. “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.”

— Rex Stout

123. “Fred put vinegar on things, and no man who did that ate at Wolfe’s table. Fred did it back in 1932, calling for vinegar and stirring it into brown roux for a squab. Nothing had been said, Wolfe regarding it as immoral to interfere with anybody’s meal until it was down and the digestive processes completed, but the next morning he had fired Fred and kept him fired for over a month.”

— Rex Stout

124. “As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.”

— Rex Stout

125. “Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating.”

— Rex Stout

126. “When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn’t occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.”

— Rex Stout

127. “Good heavens.” Wolfe pushed back his chair, not of course with violence, but with determination. “Archie. Understand this. As a man of action you are tolerable, you are even competent. But I will not for one moment put up with you as a psychologist. I.”

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

129. “He lowered the magazine. “Archie. You may remember that I once returned a retainer of forty thousand dollars which a client named Zimmermann had paid me, because he wanted to tell me how to handle his case instead of leaving it to me. Well?” He lifted the magazine. He lowered it again. “Please type the report.” He lifted it again.”

— Rex Stout

130. “I decided that the only way to keep feminine intuition from sneaking through an occasional lucky stab was to stay away from women altogether, which wasn’t practical.”

— Rex Stout

131. “It was quite conceivable that Miss Tenzer had aroused in some man, possibly Richard Valdon, the kind of reaction that is an important factor in the propagation of the species; in fact, in more men than one.”

— Rex Stout

132. “I think the police and the FBI are quite capable of sacrificing the rights of a private citizen to what they consider the public interest.”

— Rex Stout

133. “But Mr. Cramer,.” Wolfe protested, “is it my fault if destiny likes this address?”

— Rex Stout

134. “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

135. “Everything about her, the way she walked, the way she stood, her eyes and mouth and whole face, seemed to be saying, without trying or intending to, that if you happened to be hers, and she yours, life would be full of pleasant and interesting surprises.”

— Rex Stout

136. “To say that a 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.”

— Rex Stout

137. “Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damned fool or a hero, I don’t know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that’s that. When you write a play you’ve got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the...”

— Rex Stout

138. “This,” Herb said, “is the acme. The absolute acme. Why don’t we just pull up to him and ask where he’s going?”

— Rex Stout

139. “The ideal human agreement is one in which distinctions of race and color and religion are totally disregarded; anyone helping to preserve those distinctions is postponing that ideal; and you are certainly helping to preserve them.”

— Rex Stout

140. “As between the intolerable and the merely distasteful, I must choose the latter.”

— Rex Stout

141. “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.”

— Rex Stout

142. “Archie.” He was gruff. “No man can hold himself accountable for the results of his psychological defects, especially those he shares with all his fellow men, such as lack of omniscience. It is a vulgar fallacy that what you don’t know can’t hurt you; but it is true that what you don’t know can’t convict you.”

— Rex Stout

143. “I followed the pavement a little over a mile and then turned left again onto a dirt road. It was as narrow as a bigot’s mind, and I got in the ruts and stayed there.”

— Rex Stout

144. “I gathered that with the men the consensus was that women were okay in their place, which I guess was the way cavemen felt about it, and all their male descendants. The question was, and still is, what’s their place?”

— Rex Stout

145. “No. The morning will do. You’re impetuous.” He looked at the wall clock. Fritz would come any minute to announce dinner. “Can you get Saul now?”

— Rex Stout

146. “What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?”

— Rex Stout

147. “A pig whose diet is fifty to seventy percent peanuts grows a ham of incredibly sweet and delicate succulence which, well-cured, well-kept and well-cooked, will take precedence over any other ham the world affords.”

— Rex Stout

148. “Wolfe grunted. “That’s admirably specious, but drop it. I give you my word that I haven’t the faintest notion of who killed Ellen Tenzer.” Cramer eyed him. “Your word?” “Yes, sir.”

— Rex Stout

149. “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

150. “Despite some initial reluctance to spend a whole book’s worth of time with a man who flirted with misogyny, I took the plunge. Wolfe, after all, had the good sense to live in Manhattan, and besides, you had to like a man who surrounded himself with exotic tropical plants, consumed epicurean meals, and had the chutzpah to make the universe conform to his rules. And when I met Archie Goodwin, his ebullience and his earthy, rakish charm won me over.”

— Rex Stout