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

More quotes by Rex Stout

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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.
Rex Stout
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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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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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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
Rex Stout
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I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
Rex Stout
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The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
Rex Stout
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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
Rex Stout
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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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A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
Rex Stout
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
Rex Stout
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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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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.
Rex Stout
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
Rex Stout