Quote

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.

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
Men
Reputation
Oddity
Technique
Revert
Labor
Oddities
Normal
Eccentricity
Ready
Provocation
Understand
Establishing
Action
Futile
Would
Slightest

More quotes by Rex Stout

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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
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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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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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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.
Rex Stout
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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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.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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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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God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.
Rex Stout
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
Rex Stout
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I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
Rex Stout
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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout