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

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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
Believe
Escape
Things
Murder
Hardest
Suspend
Effort
Disbelief
Anyone
Spoiled
Story
Charge
Stories
Abandon
Important
Extremely

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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
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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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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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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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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
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Everything in a story should be credible.
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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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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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 think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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