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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.

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
Vagaries
Procession
Schedule
Schedules
Mere
Broken
Becomes

More quotes by Rex Stout

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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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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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MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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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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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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The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold - if you have one.
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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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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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.
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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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As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
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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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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Everything in a story should be credible.
Rex Stout
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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.
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 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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The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
Rex Stout
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout