"It was smack in the middle of the Great Meat Shortage , when millions of pigs and steers, much to the regret of the growers and slaughterers, had sneaked off and hid in order to sell their lives dear, and to Nero Wolfe a meal without meat was an insult. His temper had got so bad that I had offered to let him eat me, and it would be best to skip his retort."

"Take Mr. Goodwin. It would be difficult for me to function effectively without him. He is irreplaceable. Yet his actions are largely governed by impulse and caprice, and that would of course incapacitate him for any important task if it were not that he has somewhere concealed in him — possibly in his brain, though I doubt it — a powerful and subtle governor."

"Wolfe was in the office looking at television, which gives him a lot of pleasure. I have seen him turn it on as many as eight times in one evening, glare at it for from one to three minutes, turn it off, and go back to his book. Once he made me a long speech about it which I may record some day."

"Four capsules were found. Two are there in your drawer. One, as I told you, was used in a scientific experiment in Wolfe's office and damn near killed him. He's keeping the other one for the Fourth of July."

"Your name's Goodwin," he told me impolitely, without overexerting any muscles. "Thanks," I thanked him. "How much do I weigh?"

"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."

"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."

"Use your brains, but give up the idea of renting mine."

"Archie. One would know everything in the world there is to know, if one waited long enough. The one fault in the passivity of Buddha as a technique for the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom is the miserably brief span of human life. He sat through the first stanza of the first canto of the preamble, and then left for an appointment with ... let us say, with a certain chemist."

"I rarely leave my house. I do like it here. I would be an idiot to leave this chair, made to fit me —"

"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."

"Gallantry is not always a lackey for lust."

"Wolfe: "Did you word the receipt properly?" "No, sir. I worded it the way you told me to.""

"You stick to it, Archie, like a leech to an udder."

"And there's no doubt he has fifteen or twenty pasts; I know that much about him."

"It's all right, boss," I said, trying to smile as if I were trying to smile bravely. "I don't think they'll ever convict me. I'm pretty sure they can't. I've got a lawyer coming to see me. You go home and forget about it. I don't want you to break training."

"… 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."

"There is nothing in the world," he said, glaring at me as if I had sent him an anonymous letter, "as indestructible as human dignity. That woman makes money killing time for fools. With it she pays me for rooting around in mud. Half of my share goes for taxes which are used to make bombs to blow people to pieces. Yet I am not without dignity."

"Wolfe pronounced a word. It was the first time I had ever heard him pronounce an unprintable word, and it stopped me short."

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

"I have never regarded myself as a feast for the eye, my attractions run more to the spiritual, but on the other hand I am not a toad, and I resented her expression."

"Cramer: "Why did you notice that?" "Ah," I said. "Now you've got me. I give up. I'm trapped. Why does anybody notice anything?""

"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."

""Indeed," I said. That was Nero Wolfe's word, and I never used it except in moments of stress, and it severely annoyed me when I caught myself using it, because when I look in a mirror I prefer to see me as is, with no skin grafted from anybody else's hide, even Nero Wolfe's."

"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?"

"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."

"You are not Archie. Thank God. One Archie is enough."

"Compose yourself, Archie. Why taunt me? Why upbraid me? I am merely a genius, not a god. A genius may discover the hidden secrets and display them; only a god could create new ones."

"It's a temptation, sure it is, but I'm not like Oscar Wilde, I can resist it."

"Pierre said I was the greatest detective in the world. All is vanity."

"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."

"To everybody, starting with us."

"The last man who spat at me," I said casually, "got three bullets in the heart before he hit the floor."

"I said, "I'm sleepy. When I have to wait until nearly midnight for my dinner and then it's squirrel stew ..." Wolfe nodded. "Yes, I know. Under those circumstances I would be no better than a maniac.""

"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."

"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 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. It may be that a bevy of beautiful maidens in pure silk yellow very sheer gowns, barefooted, singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning and scattering rose petals over me would do the trick, but I'd have to try it."

"This is the inexorable miasma of murder."

"Remember that those of us who are both civilized and prudent commit our murders only under the complicated rules which permit us to avoid personal responsibility."

"That will do, Archie." Wolfe put down his empty glass. I had never heard his tone more menacing. "I am not impressed with your failure to understand this abominable outrage. I might bring myself to tolerate it if some frightened or vindictive person shot me to death, but this is insupportable." He made the growling noise again. "My food. You know my attitude toward food." He aimed a rigid finger at the jar, and his voice trembled with ferocity. "Whoever put that in there is going to regret it."

"Archie. I submit to circumstances. So should you."

"I have no talents. I have genius or nothing."

"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."

"My job is starting you, not stopping you."

"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."

"… and besides, women do not require motives that are comprehensible by any intellectual process." "You said it," Gus acquiesced feelingly. "They roll their own."

"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."

"Wolfe was put between Carol and Alma, and I was across from him and had a good view of his reaction to the tomato soup out of a can. He got it down all right, all of it, and the only thing noticeable was noticed only by me: that he carefully did not permit me to catch his eye."

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