Rex Stout (1886 – 1975)
American author of detective fiction best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe.
If he had done nothing more than to create Archie Goodwin, Rex Stout would deserve the gratitude of whatever assessors watch over the prosperity of American literature.
There isn't a generation gap between you and me there's two.
Bosh. I find a rival but no, I won't flatter myself that Tecumseh Fox would consider himself a rival of Dol Bonner I find an eminent detective in your apartment, and that alone is enough, without adding that he is concealed in your bedroom while I am discussing my business with you...
One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there's always some reason to live another year. And I'd like to live another year so that Nixon won't be President. If he's re-elected I'll have to live another four years.
I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!
Rex is a perfect writer economical, rapid, free of clich้. Epigrammatic, intelligent, charming. What else? That's enough.
This fellow is the best of them all.
There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions is he tall, is he short? he had better quit.
I really mean what I say. A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221? B Baker Street and didn't find him.
My God you love to get them, and good Lord you hate to answer them.
Wolfe talks in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken, with the possible exception of Rex Stout after he had a gin and tonic.