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The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.

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
Book
Novels
Writing
Kinds
Kind
Writer
Novel
Books
Cookbook
American
Detective
Living
Detectives
Two
Earn

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I understand the technique of eccentricity it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.
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It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.
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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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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
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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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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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Every book takes me from 35 to 41 days to write. I don't know why that is. I've tried to get it down to 30 or 31, depending on the length of the month, but it won't work. I don't drink while I'm writing because it fuddles my logical processes, but when I finish a book I go down to the kitchen and pour myself a big belt.
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.
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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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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 have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
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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.
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In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.
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Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter.
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Everything in a story should be credible.
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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
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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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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.
Rex Stout