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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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Rex Stout
Age: 88 †
Born: 1886
Born: December 1
Died: 1975
Died: October 27
Novelist
Radio Personality
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Noblesville
Indiana
Crime
Attractions
Mercenary
Greatly
Added
Attraction
Income
Taxes

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As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
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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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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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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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The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels.
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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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MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.
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A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
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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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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
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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.
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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
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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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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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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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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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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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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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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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I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
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