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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

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
Alarm
Alarms
Sensible
Absurd
Clock
Goes
Trouble
Seems

More quotes by Rex Stout

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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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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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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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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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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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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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 understand the technique of eccentricity it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.
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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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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.
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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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.
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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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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
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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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Opinions, from experts, cost money.
Rex Stout
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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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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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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