Nero Wolfe

""No." Lily was firm. "The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs. Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking and is still there." ... The fricassee came, and the first bite, together with dumpling and gravy, made me marvel at the hellishness of Mrs. Miller's disposition, to drive a man away from that."

"There are various kinds of discipline. One man's flower is another man's weed. We submit to traffic cops and the sanitary code and so on, but we are extremely fond of certain liberties. Surely you didn't come here in order to discipline Mr. Goodwin? Don't try it; you'd soon get sick of the job."

"I carry this fat to insulate my feelings. They got too strong for me once or twice and I had that idea. If I had stayed lean and kept moving around I would have been dead long ago. ... I used to be idiotically romantic. I still am, but I've got it in hand."

"War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread."

"Don't complicate matters by assuming for me a cupidity and corruption beyond the limits I have set for myself. You're suffering from an occupational disease. 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."

"He regarded me with a cold eye. "You know, son," he said finally, "you have one or two good qualities. In a way I even like you. In another way I could stand and watch your hide peeling off and not shed any tears. You have undoubtedly got the goddamdest nerve of anybody I know except maybe Nero Wolfe.""

"Wolfe frowned at her. He hated fights about wills, having once gone so far as to tell a prospective client that he refused to engage in a tug of war with a dead man's guts for a rope."

"The story had it that Noel Hawthorne's arrow which had accidentally struck his beautiful wife had plowed diagonally across from the brow to the chin, and what was left was there behind that veil—with, it was said, one eye working—and that was what I looked at. You couldn't help it. The gray veil was fastened to her hat and extended below her chin … She was medium-sized, with what would ordinarily be called a nice youthful figure, only with the veil and knowing why it was there, you didn't have the feeling of anything being nice. I sat and stared at it, trying to ignore an inclination to offer somebody a ten-spot to pull the veil up, knowing that if it was done I'd probably offer another ten-spot to get it pulled down again."

"Mr. Kates, I have known Wolfe for twenty years, and I can tell you why we were invited here this evening. We were invited because he wanted to learn all he could as quick as he could, without leaving his chair and without Goodwin's buying gas and wearing out his tires."

"A woman who is not a fool is dangerous."

"That's the situation, my fat friend, as Charlie McCarthy said to Herbert Hoover."

"We all take chances when we exchange words with other human beings."

"One good glance and I liked the job. The girls. ... At least half a thousand of them. and the general and overwhelming impression was of -- clean, young, healthy, friendly, spirited, beautiful and ready. I stood and filled my eyes, trying to look detached. It was an ocean of opportunity. A voice at my elbow said, "I doubt very much if there's a virgin in the room. Now if you'll come to my office...""

"I'm Structural Metals, but right now I've got thirty-seven elephants in stock, over in Africa, and I can't get any other section to take them. My basic position is that elephants are non-metallic."

"With him mowed down like that in the dead of night, and with that connection he had, we felt we owed it to the community to cover all angles in an effort to prevent any breath of scandal --"

"A tiger's eyes can't make light, Saul, they can only reflect it. You've spent a day in the dark."

"This is my department, Mr. Truett." "Not the part of it I'm in at any given moment. Yours is the stock department. Mine is the murder department."

""And that's your story and you like it, huh?" "Of course it is, it's the truth!" I would have liked to use assorted tortures on her in a well-equipped underground chamber."

"It was nothing new for Wolfe to take steps, either on his own or with one or more of the operatives we used, without burdening my mind with it. His stated reason was that I worked better if I thought it all depended on me. His actual reason was that he loved to have a curtain go up revealing him balancing a live seal on his nose."

"What do we do when we have no clues? Do you know?" "No, sir." "We make one."

"You come down from your beautiful orchids day before yesterday and breeze in here and tell me merrily to draw another man-size check for that World Government outfit. When I meekly mention that the science of bookkeeping has two main branches, first addition, and second subtraction —"

"A man condemning the income tax because of the annoyance it gives him or the expense it puts him to is merely a dog baring its teeth, and he forfeits the privileges of civilized discourse. But it is possible to criticize it on other and impersonal grounds. A government, like an individual, spends money for any or all of three reasons: because it needs to, because it wants to, or simply because it has it to spend. The last is much the shabbiest. It is arguable, if not manifest, that a substantial portion of the great spring flood of billions pouring into the Treasury will in effect get spent for the last shabby reason."

"I mean the purpose she allows her cleverness to serve. That unspeakable prepared biscuit flour! Fritz and I have tried it. Those things she calls Sweeties! Pfui! And that salad dressing abomination — we have tried that too, in an emergency. What they do to stomachs heaven knows, but that woman is ingeniously and deliberately conspiring in the corruption of millions of palates. She should be stopped!"

"Frequently, twice a week or oftener, you consider the problem of guests for Miss Fraser's program. It is in fact a problem, because you want interesting people, famous ones if possible, but they must be willing to submit to the indignity of lending their presence, and their assent by silence, if nothing more, to the preposterous statements made by Miss Fraser and Mr. Meadows regarding the products they advertise."

"You have no right whatever, Mr. Anderson, except to pay your share of my fee if I earn it. You are here in my office on sufferance. Confound it, I am undertaking to solve a problem that has Mr. Cramer so nonplused that he desperately wants a hint from me before I've even begun. He doesn't mind my rudeness; he's so accustomed to it that if I were affable he'd haul me in as a material witness."

"Well. I won't pretend that I'm exasperated that you're such good friends that you haven't been able to remember what happened. If you had, and had told the police, I might not have this job."

"More than ninety-nine per cent of the bets placed on horse races are outbursts of emotion, not exercises of reason. I restrict my emotions to the activities for which they are qualified."

"Pfui." Wolfe was disgusted. "I have better use for my clients' money than buying information from policemen."

"It's okay. He never sleeps in the daytime. His mind works better when he can't see me."

"It was a new technique for making a pass at a man, but it had obvious advantages, and anyway she had plenty of other ideas and wasn't being stingy with them. At lunch she had buttered rolls for him. Now I ask you."

"I responded to his tone as a man of my temperament naturally would — I am congenitally tart and thorny — and I rejected his ultimatum."

"Much obliged. You remind me of Mr. Wolfe."

"One reason I like to work for him is that he never rides me for not acting the way he would act. He knows what I can do and that's all he ever expects; but he sure expects that."

"There are numerous layers of honesty, and the deepest should not have a monopoly."

"As I understand it, the Commies think that they get too little and capitalists get too much of the good things in life. They sure played hell with that theory that Tuesday evening."

"I'm fairly good with a billiard cue, and only Saul Panzer can beat me at tailing a man or woman in New York, but what I am best at is reporting a complicated event to Nero Wolfe."

"I lifted my right brow at him. It's one of my few outstanding talents, lifting one brow, and I save it for occasions when nothing else would quite serve the purpose."

"I'm the only woman in America who has necked with Nero Wolfe. Nightmare, my eye. He has a flair."

"It's not enough to want to do a good deed, you damn fool. Wanting is fine, but you also need some slight idea of how to go about it."

"If you like Anglo-Saxon, I belched. If you fancy Latin, I eructed. No matter which, I had known that Wolfe and Inspector Cramer would have to put up with it that evening, because that is always a part of my reaction to sauerkraut. I don't glory in it or go for a record, but neither do I fight it back. I want to be liked just for myself."

"If you need any help with all the ladies, Archie, for my age I am not to be ignored. A Swiss has a long usefulness."

"The only reason I wouldn't vote for Saul Panzer for President of the United States is that he would never dress the part. How he goes around New York, almost anywhere, in that faded brown cap and old brown suit, without attracting attention as not belonging, I will never understand. Wolfe has never given him an assignment that he didn't fill better than anyone else could except me, and my argument is why not elect him President, buy him a suit and hat, and see what happens?"

"As practicing attorneys, you gentlemen know that the potency of knowledge depends on how and when it is used."

"… I want a man who is educated or can talk like it, not too young and not too old, sharp and quick, able to take on a bushel of new facts and have them ready for use." "Jesus." Dolman clasped his hands behind his head. "J. Edgar Hoover maybe?"

"He [Nathan Harris] was lying on the bed, reading a book entitled Twilight of the Absolute, which seemed a deep dive for a dick, but then, as Finch, he was a literary agent, so I refrained from comment."

"If the processes of the subconscious can be put into rational terms at all, I think mine were something like this: (a) I have murdered a man in cold blood; (b) I am a decent and humane person, as men go, certainly not vicious or depraved; therefore (c) the conventional attitude toward the act of murder is invalid and immoral."

"This whole performance is based on an idiotic assumption, which was natural and indeed inevitable, since Mr. Rowcliff is your champion ass — the assumption that Mr. Goodwin and I are both cretins. I do not deny that at times in the past I have been less than candid with you — I will acknowledge, to humor you, that I have humbugged and hoodwinked to serve my purpose — but I still have my license, and you know what that means. It means that on balance I have helped you more than I have hurt you — not the community, which is another matter, but you Mr. Cramer, and you Mr. Bowen, and of course you others, too."

"As you may know, he is not indifferent to those attributes of young women that constitute the chief reliance of our race in our gallant struggle against the menace of the insects."

"It is desirable that you should earn your fees, but it is essential that you feel you have earned them, and that depends partly on your ego."

"Where's my beer?"