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

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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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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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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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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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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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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Wolfe scowled at her. I could see he was torn with conflicting emotions. A female in his kitchen was an outrage. A woman criticizing his or Fritz's cooking was an insult. But corned beef hash was one of life's toughest problems, never yet solved by anyone.
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MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
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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
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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.
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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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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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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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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 love to make a mistake. It is my only assurance that I cannot reasonably be expected to assume the responsibility of omniscience.
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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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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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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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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