Nero Wolfe Quotes

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.

[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

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

I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.

Genius is fine for the ignition spark, but to get there someone has to see that the radiator doesn't leak and no tire is flat.

Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket or at least had been fooling around with timetables.

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes. (Nero Wolfe)

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

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

As I understand it, a born executive is a guy who, when anything difficult or unexpected happens, yells for somebody to come and help him.

Being broke is not a disgrace, it is only a catastrophe.

What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.

Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.

If one kiss screwed up our friendship,” he whispered, “what the hell did we just do?

If getting on the ground is what keeps those good things in my life, then fine. But I will not crawl, I absolutely will not beg. 　　Stupid wolf!

To assert dignity is to lose it.

Only the man that knows to little, knows too much." Nero Wolfe

You’re still the best kisser.” “You make me want to be.

Wolfe was drinking beer and looking at pictures of snowflakes in a book someone had sent him from Czechoslovakia... ...Wolfe seemed absorbed in the pictures. Looking at him, I said to myself, "He's in a battle with the elements. He's fighting his way through a raging blizzard, just sitting there comfortably looking at pictures of snowflakes. That's the advantage of being an artist, of having imagination." I said aloud, "You mustn't go to sleep, sir, it's fatal. You freeze to death.

I stole a kiss and whispered, “I’ve never had anyone in my corner before. I like it.” “Me too.” A spark of mischief flashed in her dark eyes. “You know what else I like?” “What’s that?” Her hand slid down to grab my ass. “Being naked with you.

You can't dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art's sake, but it can't be cheerful.

More people saying what they believe would be a great improvement. Because I often do I am unfit for common intercourse.-Nero Wolfe in "Blood Will Tell

Enforced courtesy is worse than none.

Holmes is depressed. Poirot is vain. Miss Marple is brusque and eccentric. They don’t have to be attractive. Look at Nero Wolfe who was so fat that he couldn’t even leave his New York home and had to have a custom-made chair to support his weight!

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.

Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating.

Yeah. I'm the fly in the soup. I don't like it any better than you do. Flies don't like being swamped in soup, especially when it's hot.

I knew how to use a dictionary, and if I was going to be spending time around Nero Wolfe, I would have to buy one."-Archie Goodwin in Archie Meets Nero Wolfe

The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person," - Nero Wolfe

Mrs. Rachel Bruner: [trying to goad Wolfe] I thought you were afraid of nobody and nothing. Nero Wolfe: [unruffled] I can dodge folly without backing into fear.

It strikes me, sir, that you are nearing the point where even a grateful American might tell you to go to the devil.-Nero Wolfe to an FBI Agent

She turned back to me, graceful as a big cat, straight and proud, not quite smiling, her warm dark eyes as curious as if she had never seen a man before. I knew damn well I ought to say something, but what? The only thing to say was “Will you marry me?” but that wouldn’t do because the idea of her washing dishes or darning socks was preposterous.

When I consider myself superior to anyone, as I frequently do, I need a better reason than his skin.

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.

Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.

Wolfe could get sentimental about it if he wanted to, but I don't like any stranger nosing around my private affairs, let alone a nation of 130 million people.-Archie Goodwin

I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.

Dignities are like faces; no two are the same.

When we turned right on Thirty-fifth Street our suffix came along. By the time we rolled to the curb in front of Wolfe's house there wasn't even hyphen between us.

Nothing is obvious in itself. Obviousness is subjective.

Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life

I have undertaken to to find an explanation for something that can't possibly be explained-Nero Wolfe

Is this Nero Wolfe’s house?” The voice got me one-half awake. “Yes. Archie Goodwin.” “This is Sarah Jaffee. I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Goodwin, did I wake you up?” “Not quite. Go ahead and finish it.

He looked in her eyes, and she wondered if she made a good decision starting something like that with a guy like Nero. She knew he was like a wolf. The man was definitely an animal, and he looked at her only as food. Yet that excited a small part of Elle, and that was what scared her the most

As long as I live I'll never forget the time he had a bank president pinched, or rather I did, on no evidence whatever except that the fountain pen on his desk was dry. I was never so relieved in my life as when the guy shot himself an hour later.

All there was to it, he was in a panic. He was scared stiff that any minute a fact might come bouncing in that would force him to send me down to Cramer bearing gifts, and there was practically nothing on earth he wouldn't rather do, even eating ice cream with cantaloupe or horseradish on oysters.

And what thoughts or memories, would you guess, were passing through my mind on this extraordinary occasion? Was I thinking of the Sibyl's prophecy, of the omen of the wolf-cub, of Pollio's advice, or of Briseis's dream? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my three Imperial predecessors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, their lives and deaths? Of the great danger I was still in from the conspirators, and from the Senate, and from the Gaurds battalions at the Camp? Of Messalina and our unborn child? Of my grandmother Livia and my promise to deify her if I ever became Emperor? Of Postumus and Germanicus? Of Agrippina and Nero? Of Camilla? No, you would never guess what was passing through my mind. But I shall be frank and tell you what it was, though the confession is a shameful one. I was thinking, 'So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now. Public recitals to large audiences. And good books too, thirty-five years' hard work in them. It wont be unfair. Pollio used to get attentive audiences by giving expensive dinners. He was a very sound historian, and the last of the Romans. My history of Carthage is full of amusing anecdotes. I'm sure that they'll enjoy it.

If you collected all the good faith in this room right now you might fill a teaspoon.

This is the unluckiest day I've had since my rich uncle changed doctors.

Wolfe: 'Our next step is obvious, but it must wait...' Archie: It was nice to know the next step was obvious, but it would have been even nicer to know what it was.

To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.

If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you're surprised if a National Chairman calls you to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you're not really surprised.

Everything about her, the way she walked, the way she stood, her eyes and mouth and whole face, seemed to be saying, without trying or intending to, that if you happened to be hers, and she yours, life would be full of pleasant and interesting surprises.

I suspected the movies, considering her cheap crack about me being a ten-cent Clark Gable, which was ridiculous. He simpers, to begin with, and to end with no one can say I resemble a movie actor, and if they did it would be more apt to be Gary Cooper than Clark Gable.

War doesn’t mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread. Pfui!

No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables.

Invade a man’s privacy and then put the burden on him.

He was as indignant and irritated as if he had been served a veal cutlet with an egg perched on it.

If you want to be contentious wait until you learn what you have to contend with. It works better that way.

The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off.

It would take an extremely unattractive person to think of that." --Nero Wolfe, on the plot of "Cordially Invited to Meet Death" by Rex Stout, p. 159 of 192

...if he had married Mrs. Albert Grantham for her money I freely admit that no man marries without a reason and with her it would have been next to impossible to think up another one....

I wouldn’t use physical violence even if I could, because one of my romantic ideas is that physical violence is beneath the dignity of a man, and that whatever you get by physical aggression costs more than it is worth.

Yes, I said something to him, and then I cooled him off.” “Cooled? By what process?” “I knocked him halfway across Broadway and took my wife.” “You did?” Wolfe scowled at him. “What’s the matter with your brain? Does it leak?

She had been a pleasant surprise. From what her father had said I had expected an intellectual treat in a plain wrapper, but the package was attractive enough to take your attention off of the contents....she was not in any way hard to look at, and those details which had been first disclosed when she appeared in her swimming rig were completely satisfactory.

He wrote short and he wrote often, which tended to obscure the fact that he wrote well. Unless it leads to obscurity, brevity is rarely praised (or employed) in the journals of, ah, serious literary criticism, and frequency is often equated with frivolity.

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.

I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.

Probably my conception of a widow was formed in my early boyhood in Ohio, from a character called Widow Rowley, who lived across the street. I have known others since, but the conception has not been entirely obliterated, so there is always an element of shock when I meet a female who has been labeled widow and I find that she has some teeth, does not constantly mutter to herself, and can walk without a cane.

Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef's ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish.

I saw them. It was impossible to snitch a sample." He grunted, lowering himself into his chair. "I didn't ask you to." "Who said you did, but you expected me to. There are three of them in a glass case and the guard has his feet glued." "What color are they?" "They're not black." "Black flowers are never black. What color are they?" "Well." I considered. "Say you take a piece of coal. Not anthracite. Cannel coal." "That's black." "Wait a minute. Spread on it a thin coating of open kettle molasses. That's it." "Pfui. You haven't the faintest notion what it would look like. Neither have I." "I'll go buy a piece of coal and we'll try it.

Fritz was standing there, four feet back from the door to the office, which was standing open, staring wide-eyed at me. When he saw I was looking at him he beckoned me to come, and the thought popped into my mind that, with guests present and Wolfe making an oration, that was precisely how Fritz would act if the house was on fire.

His reaction was humane, romantic, and thoroughly admirable. As if we had rehearsed it a dozen times, he arose without a word, got his hat and stick from a nearby table, came and gave me a pat on the shoulder, growled at the audience, “A paradise for puerility,” and turned and headed for the door. I followed. No one moved to intercept us.

Wolfe regarded him. “Either, sir, you’re an ass or you’re masquerading as one. When there is evidence that you have murdered, there will be not a suspicion but a conviction. If I had evidence that one or more of you is guilty I wouldn’t sit here half the night, inviting you to jabber; I would phone the police to come and get you. Have you anything to say?

As I trotted down the hall, Fritz was holding the street door open and three people were entering in the shape of a sandwich – a dick, Zorka, and another dick.

...it is our good fortune that the exigencies of birth and training furnish all of us with the opportunities for snobbery.

The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person. It is mine. I am sometimes successful.

Well, go on. I don’t answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.

Certainly, certainly.” Irby sure was anxious to please. The dewdrops on his freckled cupola might have been glued on.

When, sometime around my fortieth birthday, I was struck by the urge to try to write a novel, I was vastly comforted to learn that Rex Stout didn’t write his first Nero Wolfe tale until he was forty-seven, and that he proceeded to write them right up to his death at the age of eighty-eight. It was considerably less comforting to learn that he typically completed a novel in thirty-eight days, and that he always got it right on the first try. P. G. Wodehouse once said, “Stout’s supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin.” That’s how I’ve always felt about it, too. When I returned those first Rex Stout books to my librarian, I said to her, “Do you have any more of these Archie Goodwin stories?” She smiled, I recall, and said, “Why, yes. Dozens.

I got the address from her, and by good luck it wasn't Bucyrus, Ohio, but merely Brooklyn. Whatever else you want to say about Brooklyn, and so do I, it does have one big advantage, it's close.

Third, I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.

When I told [Lily Rowan] I wouldn't be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words.

Of course the Times tried to insist on speaking with Wolfe. When the last trumpet sounds the Times will want to check with Gabriel himself, and for the next edition will try to get it confirmed by even Higher Authority.

I looked at the woman next to Bernard Quest on his left. She was middle-aged, with a scrawny neck and dominating ears, and was unquestionably a rugged individualist, since no lipstick had been allowed anywhere near her.

I've always believed in the Nero Wolfe theory of knowledge. You can just sit quietly in your room - according to Pascal, the activity that if practiced more assiduously would free humanity from most of its troubles, but that was before e-mail - and through sheer mental effort force the tiniest snippets of information to yield the entire story of which they are a fragment, because the whole truth is contained in every particle of it, the way every human cell contains our DNA.

Being a lover of beauty, I permitted myself occasional glances at her profile, and observed that her chin was even better from that angle than from the front. Of course there was an off chance that she was a murderess, but you can’t have everything

for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.

Wolfe was going on. “I didn’t have a client this morning, or even an hour ago, but now I have. Mr. Rowcliff’s ferocious spasms, countenanced by you gentlemen, have made the challenge ineluctable. When Mr. Goodwin said that I was not concerned in this matter and that he was acting solely in his own personal interest, he was telling the truth. As you may know, he is not indifferent to those attributes of young women that constitute the chief reliance of our race in our gallant struggle against the menace of the insects. He is especially vulnerable to young women who possess not only those more obvious charms but also have a knack of stimulating his love of chivalry and adventure and his preoccupation with the picturesque and the passionate.

As requested by quite a mixture—the Police Commissioner and two of his deputies, the District Attorney, a bunch of inspectors and deputy inspectors, not to mention Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I’m talking from the private office of the Commissioner—you know it; you’ve been here. After these days and nights of camaraderie with them—is that the way to pronounce it?” “Almost.” “Good. I am held in high esteem by the whole shebang, from Commissioner all the way down to Lieutenant Rowcliff, which is quite a distance. Wanting to show me what they think of me, they are bestowing a great honor on me. Having a request to make of you, they are letting me make it. They’re all sitting here gazing at me so tenderly I’ve got a lump in my throat. You ought to see them.

Fred put vinegar on things, and no man who did that ate at Wolfe’s table. Fred did it back in 1932, calling for vinegar and stirring it into brown roux for a squab. Nothing had been said, Wolfe regarding it as immoral to interfere with anybody’s meal until it was down and the digestive processes completed, but the next morning he had fired Fred and kept him fired for over a month.

She marched across to his desk, extended a hand, and told him cordially, “You look exactly right! Just as I thought! I would—” She broke it off because she was getting a deep freeze. He had moved no muscle, and the expression on his face, while not belligerent, was certainly not cordial. She drew back. He spoke. “I don’t shake hands with you because you might later think it an imposition. We’ll see. Sit down, Miss Eads.

Parker, who was six feet four with nothing to protect his bones from exposure to the weather but tough-looking leathery skin, was so skeptical that at one point I thought he was going to pass, but he finally conceded that the move might be undertaken without undue risk to juridical virtue, to his own reputation, or to his client’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. When all details had been settled and money passed—a dollar bill from Sarah to Parker as a token retainer—I got at the phone and dialed a number.

Any company? Or was Olga here?” “No.” I shrugged. “That requires no practice.” I leaned to her a little. “Look, Mrs. Jaffee, I might as well admit it. I’m here under false pretenses. I said we wanted information, Mr. Wolfe and I, and we do, but we also want help. Of course you know of the provisions of Priscilla’s father’s will? Now that she is dead, you know that five people—Helmar, Brucker, Quest, Pitkin, and Miss Duday—you know that they will own most of the Softdown stock?” “Yes, certainly.” She was frowning, concentrating at me.

It was a pleasure to go for that lawyer and usher him in to the red leather chair, but I must admit that physically he was nothing to flaunt. I have never seen a balder man, and his hairless freckled dome had a peculiar attraction. It was covered with tiny drops of sweat, and nothing ever happened to them. He didn’t touch them with a handkerchief, they didn’t get larger or merge and trickle, and they didn’t dwindle. They just stood pat. There was nothing repulsive about them, but after ten minutes or so the suspense was quite a strain.

Miss Duday is absolutely right,” I told them. “I don’t mean that what she said is right—that I don’t know about—but she was right in saying that if you try to hold out and cover up you’ll just prolong the agony. It’ll all come out, don’t think it won’t, the bad with the good, and the quicker the better.” I looked at the president. “It wouldn’t hurt a bit, Mr. Brucker, if you followed Miss Duday’s example. Where does everybody stand, the way you see it? For instance, this conference you were having. Whose idea was it? What were you talking about? What were you saying?

I crossed to a dark-eyed smooth-skinned creature manipulating a machine bigger than her, and asked where the conference room was, and she pointed to the far end of the room, away from the street. I went there, found a door in a partition, opened it and passed through, and closed the door behind me. The partition was well soundproofed, for as soon as I shut the door the clatter and hum of the big room’s activity became just a murmur. This room was of medium size, square, with a fine old mahogany table in the middle, and chairs to match all the way around it. At the far side was a stairhead. One of the five people seated in a cluster at the end of the table could have been Hargreaves of the 1768 spinning jenny, or anyhow his son, with his pure white hair and his wrinkled old skin trying to find room enough for itself with the face meat gone. He still had sharp blue-gray eyes, and they drew me in his direction as I displayed my case and said, “Goodwin. Detective. About the murder of Priscilla Eads. Mr. Brucker?