Nero Wolfe Quotes

Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life ~ Rex Stout

When, sometime around my fortieth birthday, I was struck by the urge to try to write a novel, I was vastly comforted to learn that Rex Stout didn't write his first Nero Wolfe tale until he was forty-seven, and that he proceeded to write them right up to his death at the age of eighty-eight. It was considerably less comforting to learn that he typically completed a novel in thirty-eight days, and that he always got it right on the first try. P. G. Wodehouse once said, "Stout's supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin." That's how I've always felt about it, too. When I returned those first Rex Stout books to my librarian, I said to her, "Do you have any more of these Archie Goodwin stories?" She smiled, I recall, and said, "Why, yes. Dozens. ~ Rex Stout

The avoidance of idiocy should be the primary and constant concern of every intelligent person, - Nero Wolfe ~ Rex Stout

Currently he was going through the entire Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout, He'd just finished Murder by the Book and was in the process of downloading Triple Jeopardy to his e-reader when the alarm went off. ~ Keith R.A. DeCandido

Women don't require motives that are comprehensible to my intellectual processes.
(Nero Wolfe) ~ Rex Stout

When I told [Lily Rowan] I wouldn't be able to make it to the Polo Grounds tomorrow, she began to call Wolfe names, and thought of several new ones that showed her wide experience and fine feeling for words. ~ Rex Stout

Nature has arranged that when you overcome a given inertia the resulting momentum is proportionate. If I were to begin borrowing money I would end by devising means of persuading the Secretary of the Treasury to lend me the gold reserve. ~ Rex Stout

More people saying what they believe would be a great improvement. Because I often do I am unfit for common intercourse.-Nero Wolfe in Blood Will Tell ~ Rex Stout

I have undertaken to to find an explanation for something that can't possibly be explained-Nero Wolfe ~ Rex Stout

It strikes me, sir, that you are nearing the point where even a grateful American might tell you to go to the devil.-Nero Wolfe to an FBI Agent ~ Rex Stout

Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef's ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. ~ Rex Stout

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. ~ Rex Stout

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits. ~ Rex Stout

I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know.
(Nero Wolfe) ~ Rex Stout

The deepest show of love is when you surrender your mind, body and soul to me to use as I please, trusting that when I take you to the brink of my self-control, I'll bring you back more whole than before. ~ Scarlet Wolfe

Ever since poets have written and women have read them (for which the poets should be most deeply grateful) women have been called angels so many times that, in very truth, in their simplicity of soul, they have believed the compliment, forgetting that, for money, the same poets have glorified Nero as a demigod ... ~ Mikhail Lermontov

Writers vary tremendously. Was it Tom Wolfe who stood up or was it [Ernest] Hemingway who had to stand up? I don't know. ~ Rod Serling

and in that moment, Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best as he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called being a father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector's armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line. ~ Tom Wolfe

The ground recoiled, shocked. The worktable swooped beneath him as though it were a swing whose rope had broken. He turned over, grinding his belly against the table, holding the sides with his outstretched hands to kill the fear. The figure was standing now, and his feet held the ground flatly, directly on the damp, breathing earth. As trees do, he sought strength with grasping, rock-splitting notes. The first step shook the earth almost as the standing had. After ~ Gene Wolfe

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech. ~ Gene Wolfe

It is a part of our office to stand uncloaked, masked, sword bared, upon the scaffold for a long time before the client is brought out. Some say this is to symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice, but I believe the real reason is to give the crowd a focus, and the feeling that something is about to take place. A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart. Before the Hall of Justice, a ring of dimarchi surrounded the scaffold with their lances, and the pistol their officer carried could, I suppose, have killed fifty or sixty before someone could snatch it from him and knock him to the cobblestones to die. Still it is better to have a focus, and some open symbol of power.
Wolfe, Gene (1994-10-15). Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' (p. 184). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition. ~ Gene Wolfe

We live in a time of unprecedented abundance. ~ David Wolfe

Once I saw torches with dancing flames of scarlet and radiant gold held by solemn apes. A man with the horns and muzzled face of a bull bent over me, a constellation sprung to life. I spoke to him and found myself telling him that I was unsure of the precise date of my birth, that if his benign spirit of meadow and unfeigning force had governed my life I thanked him for it; then remembered that I knew the date, that my father had given a ball for me each year until his death, that it fell under the Swan. He listened intently, turning his head to watch me from one brown eye. ~ Gene Wolfe

Many animals flourish not in spite of the fact that they are "animals" but because they are "animals" - or even more precisely, perhaps, because they are felt to be members of our families and our communities, regardless of their species. And yet, at the very same moment, billions of animals in factory farms, many of whom are very near to or indeed exceed cats and dogs and other companion animals in the capacities we take to be relevant to standing (the ability to experience pain and suffering, anticipatory dread, emotional bonds and complex social interactions, and so on), have as horrible a life as one could imagine, also because they are "animals."

Clearly, then, the question here is not simply of the "animal" as the abjected other of the "human" tout court, but rather something like a distinction between bios and zoe that obtains within the domain of domesticated animals itself. ~ Cary Wolfe

You're mine, London. We can dance this violent dance until we bleed each other dry, or we can surrender. Your choice. But I will have you. ~ Trisha Wolfe

God created black people and black people created style. ~ George C. Wolfe

He was twenty eight years old now, and wise enough to know that there are sometimes reasons of which the reason knows nothing, and that the fictional pattern of one's life, formed and set by years of living, is not to be discarded quite as easily as one may throw away a battered hat or worn-out shoe. ~ Thomas Wolfe

I read Wolfe's new book _ The Story of a Novel_ and as usual he stole the whole damn thing from me. I am going to write and say will you please stop writing books you bastard. ~ Jean Stafford

After experiencing life in Nazi Germany, Thomas Wolfe wrote, Here was an entire nation ... infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations. ~ Erik Larson

Stop worrying about when this ends. You can't tell me the thought hasn't crossed your mind that it won't. ~ Scarlet Wolfe

Paul was Nero's prisoner, but Nero was much more God's. ~ William Gurnall

. "Well precious, let this be a lesson." He snapped my hands above my head, gripping them both with only one of his. He slid his fingers down my cheek, pausing to run his thumb over my bottom lip. "You shouldn't come out to play until you have the power to party like a big girl." ~ Reese Patcher ~ Trisha Wolfe

When a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but a payment. ~ Gene Wolfe

I nodded and grasped the woman by the arm; the cataphracts released her and turned away like silver automata. ~ Gene Wolfe

Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

This is a moment: ~ Thomas Wolfe

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. ~ Tom Wolfe

I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire. ~ Tom Wolfe

The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again ... the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of the old October. ~ Thomas Wolfe

I'm not drunk, Andrew. I'm Percocet." "Ah. So dangerously relaxed? ~ Inger Ash Wolfe

Can a wolfe be beautiful? ~ Markus Zusak

But I had long since learned from Wolfe that the corner the light doesn't reach is the one the dime rolled to. ~ Rex Stout

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them. ~ Tom Wolfe

Who hath a Wolfe for his mate, needes a Dog for his man. ~ George Herbert

The force field may imprison Karm, but Prince Sebastian has imprisoned me. I'm trapped in a prison within a prison. ~ Trisha Wolfe

She was wearing a skirt and a big-shouldered jacket of a royal blue that was fashionable in France, a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse, and electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes. ~ Tom Wolfe

We're coming up on Ritadaria," he told Syn. "Bet you never thought you'd be back here." "Not alive, anyway. What about you?" "As a tracer and tracker, I bill them, but it doesn't mean I like it here any more than you do. I try to avoid coming here to the planet as much as I can." Shahara frowned. "Aren't you afraid they'll arrest you?" Nero snorted. "I wasn't a convict, Dagan. I was an illegally purchased slave. My owner"-he sneered the term-"has no legal claim on me. And I'm no longer a kid learning my powers. I'm a full-grown man with an ax I want to bury in the forehead of anyone dumb enough to come at me. I defy the bastards to try something now."
- Nero, Syn, & Shahara ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

When I went to high school, my most passionate desire was to be a professional baseball player. But something within me told me that was not going to happen. ~ Tom Wolfe

When I review Xerxes' achievements, I praise him, not for having yoked the Hellespont, but for having crossed it. But I can see that Nero will neither sail through the Isthmus nor complete his digging. ~ Apollonius Of Tyana

Calcification is the hardening of body tissues by calcium salts or deposits. Although calcification itself is not considered a disease, it has been shown to be a significant contributing factor in nearly every known illness and aging condition, including heart disease, kidney stones, gallstones, chronic inflammation, arthritis, cancers, cataracts, eczema, psoriasis, and even wrinkles. ~ David Wolfe

Being on the road and doing events is like getting kids ready for school for most families. ~ David Wolfe

Though trodden beneath the shepherd's heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground. ~ Gene Wolfe

I'm afraid it's not nonsense," Genghis said, shaking his turbaned head and continuing his story. "As I was saying before the little girl interrupted me, the baby didn't dash off with the other orphans. She just sat there like a sack of flour. So I walked over to her and gave her a kick to get her moving."

"Excellent idea!" Nero said. "What a wonderful story this is! And then what happened?"

"Well, at first it seemed like I'd kicked a big hole in the baby," Genghis said, his eyes shining, "which seemed lucky, because Sunny was a terrible athlete and it would have been a blessing to put her out of her misery."

Nero clapped his hands. "I know just what you mean, Genghis," he said. "She's a terrible secretary as well."

"But she did all that stapling," Mr. Remora protested.
"Shut up and let the coach finish his story," Nero said.

"But when I looked down," Genghis continued, "I saw that I hadn't kicked a hole in a baby. I'd kicked a hole in a bag of flour! I'd been tricked!"

"That's terrible!" Nero cried. ~ Lemony Snicket

They're just beginning to open the doors in their minds"
"But once you've been through that door, you can't just keep going through it over and over again ... ~ Tom Wolfe

The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a team generally regarded as seeking justice, can be compared to the adventures of Rex Stout's two most famous characters, Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin. ~ James Grady

Instead of beseeching men to be reconciled to God, we find ministers wasting their time in giving Sunday lectures about all kinds of subjects. Rome is burning and Nero is playing his fiddle. Souls are perishing and minsters are amusing them. ~ Todd Friel

It's a pity you are a torturer," Ultan said. "You might have been a philosopher. ~ Gene Wolfe

Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman. ~ Tom Wolfe

Nevertheless, it was not necessary to assume, as Wolfe had in the case of Viola Duday, that if he had killed Priscilla Eads he had probably done so by contrivance and not by perpetration. In spite of his pure white hair and wrinkled old skin, I would have bet, from the way he looked and moved and held his shoulders and head, that he could still have chinned himself up to five or six times. ~ Rex Stout

When you spend your life in a creative mode all the time mindless leaf blowing can be a welcome break. ~ Art Wolfe