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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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Rex Stout
Age: 88 †
Born: 1886
Born: December 1
Died: 1975
Died: October 27
Novelist
Radio Personality
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Noblesville
Indiana
Books
Going
Sure
Kind
Living
Detective
Make
Write
Detectives
Two
Cook
Stories
Cooks
Kinds
Book
Pretty
Writing

More quotes by Rex Stout

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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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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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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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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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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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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.
Rex Stout
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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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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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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.
Rex Stout
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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
Rex Stout
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
Rex Stout
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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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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 man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
Rex Stout
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I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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
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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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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.
Rex Stout