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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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Rex Stout
Age: 88 †
Born: 1886
Born: December 1
Died: 1975
Died: October 27
Novelist
Radio Personality
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Noblesville
Indiana
Rounds
Born
Thought
Character
Writing
Contrived
Flat
Flats
Round

More quotes by Rex Stout

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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
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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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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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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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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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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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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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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
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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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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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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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I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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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.
Rex Stout
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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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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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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
Rex Stout
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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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The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off
Rex Stout