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Your Quotes for 1 December 2005 - Rex Stout

Rex Todhunter Stout was born at Noblesville, Indiana on this day in 1886. At age nine he was known as a prodigy in arithmetic. He attended the University of Kansas for a short time, then joined the Navy and served as warrant officer on Teddy Roosevelt's yacht. He devised a school banking program that was used in over 400 US cities, then went to Paris to write. After three novels, he wrote Fer-de-lance, his first mystery novel featuring the stay-at-home fat (a seventh of a ton) genius detective Nero Wolfe and his energetic legman Archie Goodman. A month before his death his 72nd Nero Wolfe mystery A Family Affair was published, and one more was discovered after his death. He wrote his novels long hand for many years, with very few revisions and he never rewrote a page. I believe that every Nero Wolfe story or novel can be found on the shelf here, both Larkin and I tend to reread the entire collection every three or four years. These quotes are all from the great detective.

I don't answer questions containing two or more unsupported assumptions.
     - The Rubber Band

War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.
     - Over My Dead Body

A schedule broken at will becomes a mere procession of vagaries.
     - Murder By the Book

No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.
     - Before Midnight

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

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.
     - A Family Affair

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