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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

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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
Two
Kinds
Character
Questions
Better
Characters
Kind
Short
Writer
Synthetic
Fiction
Quit
Asks
Quitting
Born
Tall

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It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.
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Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
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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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God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.
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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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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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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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Opinions, from experts, cost money.
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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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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.
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Bosh. I find a rival - but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner - I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you.
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Sometimes it's things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you're hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you're in a hurry, but usually it's people.
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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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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
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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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A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
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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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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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