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Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

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
Unknowable
Philosophers
Fools
Philosopher
Waste
Fool
Time

More quotes by 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.
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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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As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
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The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote
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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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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.
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In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.
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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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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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Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
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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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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I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
Rex Stout
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Everything in a story should be credible.
Rex Stout
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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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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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I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.
Rex Stout
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We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
Rex Stout
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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.
Rex Stout