Top 150 Rex Stout Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “Enforced courtesy is worse than none.”

— Rex Stout

109. “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

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

— Rex Stout

111. “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

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

— Rex Stout

113. “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

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

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Rex Stout

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

124. “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

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

— Rex Stout

126. “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

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

— Rex Stout

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Rex Stout

131. “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

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

— Rex Stout

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

— Rex Stout

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “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

147. “Mrs. Jaffee a little earlier. I asked if he was escorting Mrs. Jaffee. “Certainly,” he said virtuously. “She is my client. What’s that noise you’re making?” “It’s something special,” I told him, “and takes a lot of practice. Don’t try it offhand. It’s a derisive chortle.”

— Rex Stout

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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