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

Rex Stout

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Rex Stout
Age: 88 †
Born: 1886
Born: December 1
Died: 1975
Died: October 27
Novelist
Radio Personality
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Noblesville
Indiana
Impulse
Library
May
Reason
Men
Impulses
Arena
Nonsense

More quotes by Rex Stout

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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.
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.
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I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness.
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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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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.
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
Rex Stout
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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
Rex Stout
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
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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.
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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
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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
Rex Stout
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As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
Rex Stout
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God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.
Rex Stout
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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 made.
Rex Stout