Rex Stout 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 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.

The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold -- if you have one.

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

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

MY rule is never to be rude to anyone unless you mean it.

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.

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.

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." [Life magazine, December 10, 1965]

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.

To assert dignity is to lose it.

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous scene. [An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]

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.

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.

That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.

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 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him." [An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]

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

Enforced courtesy is worse than none.

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.

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.

The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that 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." [Life magazine, December 10, 1965]

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.

A guest is a jewel on the cushion of hospitality

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

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

You know what my boss says? He says that skepticism is a good watchdog if you know when to take the leash off.

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

Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.

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.

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. 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. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

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

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

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.

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.

You can't base your actions on the theory that anyone you don't keep your eye on is apt to get killed.

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.

but I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn’t reach is the one the dime rolled to.

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.

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

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....

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.

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.

I could have told, just looking at him, that that was the tone he would use asking a question. A tone that took it for granted any question he asked was going to be answered because he asked it. I don't like it and I know of no way anybody is ever going to make me like it.

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?

When people's brains stop working, just go somewhere else." (Death of a Doxie)

I’m not hysterical.” “Of course you are. All women are. Their moments of calm are merely recuperative periods between outbursts. I

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.

I decided that the only way to keep feminine intuition from sneaking through an occasional lucky stab was to stay away from women altogether, which wasn’t practical.

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.

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

The point is, did she kill that woman? If I thought she did I would bow out quick — I would already have bowed out because it would have been hopeless. But she didn’t One will get you ten that she didn’t. If she had—” The interruption wasn’t words; it was her lips against mine and her palms covering my ears. If she had been Wolfe’s client I would have shoved her off quick, since that sort of demonstration only ruffles him, but she was mine and there was no point in hurting her feelings. I even patted her shoulder. When she was through I resumed.

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.