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It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.

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
Wiser
Choice
Trust
Greatest
Choices
Force
Always
World
Inertia

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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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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.
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Dignities are like faces no two are the same.
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Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
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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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A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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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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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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No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.
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Measure your minds height by the shadow it casts.
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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.
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Everything in a story should be credible.
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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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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
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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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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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The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
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I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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