Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Rex Stout

Image
The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.
Rex Stout
Image
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
Rex Stout
Image
God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.
Rex Stout
Image
Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
Rex Stout
Image
I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
Rex Stout
Image
It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.
Rex Stout
Image
The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
Everything in a story should be credible.
Rex Stout
Image
Opinions, from experts, cost money.
Rex Stout
Image
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.
Rex Stout
Image
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.
Rex Stout
Image
Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
Rex Stout
Image
The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
Rex Stout
Image
Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions - is he tall, is he short? - he had better quit.
Rex Stout