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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.

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
Mistake
Responsibility
Cannot
Omniscience
Make
Reasonably
Love
Assurance
Assume
Assuming
Expected

More quotes by Rex Stout

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The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
Rex Stout
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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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I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
Rex Stout
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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.
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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A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
Rex Stout
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A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality
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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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.
Rex Stout
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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
Rex Stout
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
Rex Stout
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout
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I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
Rex Stout
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
Rex Stout