Rex Stout

“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.”

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

“Wolfe still paid no attention to me. As a matter of fact, I didn't expect him to, since he was busy taking exercise. He had recently got the impression he weighed too much- which was about the same as if the Atlantic Ocean had decided it was too wet...”

“Everything in a story should be credible.”

“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.”

“Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.”

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

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

“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.”

“I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.”

“The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.”

“I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of the human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it.”

“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.”

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

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

“Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.”

“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.”

“Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try." -- Nero Wolf in Death of a Dude.”

“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.”

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