About Rex Stout: Rex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction, particularly the 33 novels and approximately 40 novellas that featured the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin between 1934 and 1975.
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.
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.
...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....
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.
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.
You are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment
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.
Well." Wolfe was judicious. "You were not under oath. The police have been lied to informally many times by many people, including me. The right to lie in the service of your own interests is highly valued and frequently exercised.
To assert dignity is to lose it.
Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.
We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.
I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
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.
Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.
Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.
Everything in a story should be credible.
I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
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.
