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

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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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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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Opinions, from experts, cost money.
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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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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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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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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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Sometimes it's things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you're hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you're in a hurry, but usually it's people.
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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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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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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The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
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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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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.
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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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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
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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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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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