Nero Wolfe

"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."

"Gallantry is not always a lackey for lust."

"I pay him the tribute of speaking of him and feeling about him precisely as I did when he lived; the insult would be to smear his corpse with the honey excreted by my fear of death."

"Starving the live will not profit the dead."

"I remembered that one evening after dinner I had heard Wolfe and Marko discussing the trout they had caught in their early days, Marko claiming he had once landed one 40 centimeters long, and I had translated it into inches — 16. I swiveled my head to ask Wolfe if it was in the Cijevna that he and Marko had got trout, and he said yes, but in a tone of voice that did not invite conversation, so I let it lie."

"Wolfe’s attitude was perfect for saying "Over my dead body," but he didn’t say it."

"...Miss Tescher answered, "I suppose you know I am assistant director of research at Clock.""At least I know it now.""The publicity about the contest...was discussed at a conference this afternoon. I can tell you confidentially that Mr. Tite himself was there...""

"I gave Wolfe the scuttlebutt, but apparently he wasn't listening. It was Sunday evening, when he especially enjoys turning the television off. Of course he has to turn it on first, intermittently throughout the evening, and that takes a lot of exertion, but he has provided for it by installing a remote control panel at his desk. That way he can turn off as many as twenty programs in an evening without overdoing."

"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."

"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."

"At that time of day the courthouse corridors were full of lawyers, clients, witnesses, jurors, friends, enemies, relatives, fixers, bloodsuckers, politicians, and citizens."

"I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion."

"The more you put in a brain, the more it will hold — if you have one."

"When a hippopotamus is peevish it's a lot of peeve."

"He didn't look tough, he looked flabby, but of course that's no sign. The toughest guy I ever ran into had cheeks that needed a brassière."

"As I pushed the phone back Orrie asked, "What's an arquebus?""Figure it out yourself. A combination of an ark and a bus. Amphibian.""

"I had seen two hundred and forty-seven girls it would have been fun to talk to but was too busy. I had seen about the same number of spots where a gun could be hid, but could find no one who had seen Roger Foote near any of them. None of them held a gun at the time I called, nor could I detect any trace of oil or other evidence that a gun had been there. One of them, a hole in a tree on the other side of the backstretch, was so ideal that I was tempted to hide my own gun in it."

"She danced cheerfully, and of course that was no good. You can't dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art's sake, but it can't be cheerful. For one thing, if you're cheerful you talk too much."

"In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted."

"Anyone who takes Wolfe down a peg renders a service to the balance of nature, and to tell him to his face that he was merely a carbon copy of the cops was enough to spoil his appetite for dinner."

"You are headstrong and I am magisterial. Our tolerance of each other is a constantly recurring miracle."

"A clever man might successfully disguise every element of his style but one — the paragraphing. Diction and syntax may be determined and controlled by rational processes in full consciousness, but paragraphing — the decision whether to take short hops or long ones, whether to hop in the middle of a thought or action or finish it first — that comes from instinct, from the depths of personality."

"... Lily Rowan told me once that I am about as subtle as a sledge hammer — at a moment when her diction was not determined and controlled by rational processes in full consciousness — ..."

"My status and function are whatever a given situation calls for, and the question who decides what it calls for is what occasionally creates an atmosphere in which Wolfe and I are not speaking."

"Archie, if I could lie with your aplomb I would be an ambassador. You know women. You know quite well that one with eyes the color of that Miss Bonner and eyelashes of that length, her own, is a dangerous animal."

"Apparently you have performed prodigies of sagacity and finesse without knowing it. Not surely by inadvertence. It must be that your singular faculties operate below the level of consciousness -- or above it. Perhaps the psychologists should add a new term, superconscious."

"How often have I told you that impetuosity is a virtue only when delay is dangerous?"

"One of the brain's most efficient departments is the one that turns possibilities into probabilities, and probabilities into facts."

"It helps a lot, with two people as much together as he and I were, if they understand each other. He understood that I was too strong-minded to add another word unless he told me to, and I understood that he was too pigheaded to tell me to."

"Of course you don't learn anything about people in general by walking around taking them in; you only learn things about this one or that one. I learned something that morning about a girl in a grey checked suit who caught her heel in a grating on Second Avenue in the Eighties. No girl I had ever known would have done what she did. Maybe no other girl in the world would. But I shouldn't have got started about walking."

"I don't know how a brain that is never used passes the time."

"Mr. Wolfe is in the middle of a fit. It's complicated. There's a fireplace in the front room, but it's never lit because he hates open fires. He says they stultify mental processes. But it's lit now because he's using it. He's seated in front of it, on a chair too small for him, tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster's New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language. In the past week he has given me a thousand examples of its crimes. He says it is a deliberate attempt to murder the — I beg your pardon. I describe the situation at length because he told me to bring you in there, and it will be bad."

"Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup."

"Do you use 'infer' and 'imply' interchangeably, Miss Blount?"

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

"When the last trumpet sounds the Times will want to check with Gabriel himself, and for the next edition will try to get it confirmed by even Higher Authority."

"What she did was say, "All right" and head for the door, and as I followed her out and down the two flights I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn't do what you said she would."

"He could have gone as was to Peacock Alley for a drink if he could have got past the guard at the door and on out."

"Maintaining integrity as a private detective is difficult; to preserve it for the hundred thousand words of a book would be impossible for me, as it has been for so many others. Nothing corrupts a man so deeply as writing a book; the myriad temptations are overwhelming."

"As for your lying to the police, forget it. They expect it. If nobody ever lied to them, most of them would be out of jobs long ago."

"Come, sir, is time really so precious? Mine isn't. If yours is, all the more tempting to steal a little."

"I always belong wherever I am."

"I am neither a thaumaturge nor a dunce."

"I can dodge folly without backing into fear."

"Modern science was fixing it so that anybody can do anything but nobody can know what the hell is going on."

"Pfui. Are you a dunce, or do you take me for one?"

"Yes. I cannot put sense in a fool's brain. I have tried."

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

"Trying to find a legal space at the curb would be like trying to find room for another kernel on an ear of corn..."