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.
All men are reasoning animals more than any other animal. They have a bigger brain and better brain. And we reason with our brain.
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.
Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.
Everything in a story should be credible.
Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.
I have a strong moral sense - by my standards.
I have never regarded myself as this or that. I have been too busy being myself to bother about regarding myself.
I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
I think one or two of the later Holmes stories are among the best.
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.
It is always an artistic fault in any fiction to mention any other character in fiction. It should never be done.
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.
The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.
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.
There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.
To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.
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.
Rex Stout served on the original board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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