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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.

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
Lying
Comes
Tell
Renouncing
Enough
Shrewd
Men
Gracefully
Time
Renounce
Recognize
Unless

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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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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Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
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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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I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
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A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
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I love to make a mistake. It is my only assurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the responsibility of omniscience.
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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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I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.
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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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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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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 guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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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.
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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