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...

...if he had married Mrs. Albert Grantham for her money I freely admit that no man marries without a reason and with her it would have been next to impossible to think up another one....

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.

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.

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

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.

The only difference between me and most people is that I'm perfectly aware that all my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about

If your ego is in good shape you will pretend you're surprised if a National Chairman calls you to tell you his party wants to nominate you for President of the United States, but you're not really surprised.

Yeah. I'm the fly in the soup. I don't like it any better than you do. Flies don't like being swamped in soup, especially when it's hot.

We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.

When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn't occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous

Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to.

To assert dignity is to lose it.

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.

Well." Wolfe was judicious. "You were not under oath. The police have been lied to informally many times by many people, including me. The right to lie in the service of your own interests is highly valued and frequently exercised.

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 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find

There are two kinds of statistics the kind you look up and the kind you make up.