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

More quotes by Rex Stout

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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
Rex Stout
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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 Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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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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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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Everything in a story should be credible.
Rex Stout
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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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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.
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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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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
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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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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
Rex Stout
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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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.
Rex Stout
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I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it.
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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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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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
Rex Stout
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Opinions, from experts, cost money.
Rex Stout
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
Rex Stout