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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
Going
Books
Kind
Sure
Make
Living
Detective
Write
Detectives
Two
Cook
Stories
Cooks
Book
Kinds
Writing
Pretty

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I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
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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.
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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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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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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
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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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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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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.
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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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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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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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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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