Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rex Stout
Age: 88 †
Born: 1886
Born: December 1
Died: 1975
Died: October 27
Novelist
Radio Personality
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Noblesville
Indiana
Hardest
Suspend
Effort
Disbelief
Anyone
Spoiled
Story
Charge
Stories
Abandon
Important
Extremely
Believe
Escape
Things
Murder

More quotes by Rex Stout

Image
A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
Rex Stout
Image
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.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Bosh. I find a rival - but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner - I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you.
Rex Stout
Image
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.
Rex Stout
Image
MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
Rex Stout
Image
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.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout
Image
Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
Rex Stout
Image
God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.
Rex Stout