REX STOUT

I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.

Everything in a story should be credible.

To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.

Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

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.

Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.

To say that 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.

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

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.

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

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.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

God made you and me, in certain respects, quite unequal, and it would be futile to try any interference with His arrangements.

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.

I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!

I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know. (Nero Wolfe)

The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.

I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is a hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.