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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.

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
Without
Hand
Detectives
Books
Packages
Story
Board
Hands
Boards
Chore
Stories
Mail
Unanswered
Home
Chess
Chores
Book
Manage
Detective
Come
Television
Package

More quotes by 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.
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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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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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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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 man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.
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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
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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 more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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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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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.
Rex Stout
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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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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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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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 constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.
Rex Stout