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

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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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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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Opinions, from experts, cost money.
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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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 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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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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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
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A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221½ B Baker Street and didn't find him.
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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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A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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