Rex Stout
17 quotes
Biography
"There are various ways to call a man a liar. One way is just to scream it at him, which doesn't prove anything. Another is to establish facts by long and patient investigation. Still another way is not to call him a liar at all – let him do it himself."
"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..."
"There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living – cook books and detective stories."
"If he had done nothing more than to create Archie Goodwin, Rex Stout would deserve the gratitude of whatever assessors watch over the prosperity of American literature."
"Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic."
"Rex Stout is one of the half-dozen major figures in the development of the American detective novel. With great wit and cunning, he devised a form which combined the traditional virtues of Sherlock Holmes and the English school with the fast-moving vernacular narrative of Dashiell Hammett."
"When Stout is on top of his game, which is most of the time, his diabolically clever plotting and his storytelling ability exceed that of any other mystery writer you can name, including Agatha Christie, who invented her own eccentric genius detective, Hercule Poirot."
"Stout was almost as witty as Raymond Chandler. His detective had splendid putdown lines almost as good as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And his mysteries were constructed a lot more smoothly than Agatha Christie's. But you do not expect Chandlerian wit from Conan Doyle, or Conan Doyle's superbly breathless sense of atmosphere and melodrama from Christie, or Christie's scathingly clear, unblinking vision of the monstrous crimes that average human nature is capable of all from the same pen. Stout gives you all of it. He is the Willie Mays or Derek Jeter of the mystery genre: a brilliant all-rounder more talented in each area than any single writer should ever dream of being."
"Rex is a perfect writer – economical, rapid, free of cliché. Epigrammatic, intelligent, charming. What else? That's enough."
"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."
"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."
"Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to."
"The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already"
"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"
"It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous"
"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 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find"
"There are two kinds of statistics the kind you look up and the kind you make up."