228 Quotes by Rex Stout

Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damned fool or a hero, I don’t know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that’s that. When you write a play you’ve got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the...

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 personal vengeance were the only factor I could, as you suggested, go and stick a knife in him and finish it, but that would be accepting the intolerable doctrine that man’s sole responsibility is to his ego. That was the doctrine of Hitler, as it is now of Malenkov and Tito and Franco and Senator McCarthy; masquerading as a basis of freedom, it is the oldest and toughest of the enemies of freedom.

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.

I still can’t decide which is more fun – reading or writing.

He expressed appreciation for the information I provided, taking a dozen pages of notes in his small neat hand, and asking plenty of questions, not to challenge but just to elucidate. He did offer a pointed comment about what he called our dodge with Helmar, with his ward upstairs, and I rebutted.

This,” Herb said, “is the acme. The absolute acme. Why don’t we just pull up to him and ask where he’s going?

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.

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