Rex Stout

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

Dignities are like faces no two are the same.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

To read of a detectives daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.

Everything in a story should be credible.

The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

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.

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

Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.

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

The constant petty behests of life permit few opportunities for major satisfactions, and when one is offered it should be seized.

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.

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.

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

I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.

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.

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