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

More quotes by Rex Stout

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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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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
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I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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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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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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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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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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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
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Opinions, from experts, cost money.
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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
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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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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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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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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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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.
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.
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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
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.
Rex Stout