15 Rex Stout Quotes

Rex Stout quotes

1. Archie Goodwin, after Carolyn Pratt tells him Lily Rowan will ruin her brother, chapter 3: 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.

2. Dol Bonner, to her employee Amy Duncan, chapter 2: Bosh. I find a rival - but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner - I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you...

3. Archie Goodwin, before stating one of the second kind, chapter 9: There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. To say that 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.

4. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

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

6. The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold -- if you have one.

7. What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.

8. 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.

9. A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221½ B Baker Street and didn't find him.

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

11. The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.

12. 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.