Quote

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.

Rex Stout

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rex Stout
Age: 88 †
Born: 1886
Born: December 1
Died: 1975
Died: October 27
Novelist
Radio Personality
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Noblesville
Indiana
Words
Usurped
Learn
Enlarged
Stills
Ambitious
Still
Invented
Trying
Attempt
Men
Emotions
Think
Emotion
Brain
Thinking

More quotes by Rex Stout

Image
Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.
Rex Stout
Image
The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.
Rex Stout
Image
I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
Rex Stout
Image
Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
Rex Stout
Image
I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
Rex Stout
Image
The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Rex Stout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Rex Stout
Image
I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
Rex Stout