228 Quotes by Rex Stout

To anyone seeing him but not knowing him, Saul Panzer was nothing but a little guy with a big nose who never quite caught up with his shaving.

Women don’t require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.

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

He growled. “You know quite well that that locution is vile.

You can’t tolerate a decent and swift conclusion to a skirmish between an individual and what you call society, as long as you have it in your power to turn it into a ghastly and prolonged struggle; the victim must squirm like a worm in your fingers, not for ten minutes, but for ten months. Pfui! I don’t like the law. It was not I, but a great philosopher, who said that the law is an ass.

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.

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.

Though I suppose you’ve changed your mind, now that there’s a woman sleeping in your bed – ” “Nonsense. My bed – ” “You own all the beds in this house except mine, don’t you? Certainly it’s your bed.

Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that’s why they’re still the best ones.