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

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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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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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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
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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.
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As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
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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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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
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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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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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A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
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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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I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness.
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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 will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
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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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God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.
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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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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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MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
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