Life & Wisdom Quote by Rex Stout

Pleasure, in Rex Stout's line, is framed as a fork in the road he refuses to take. "I still can't decide" sounds casual, but it’s a crafted pose: the seasoned professional pretending to be permanently undecided, as if the real victory is getting to live in the dilemma. Coming from the architect of Nero Wolfe, it reads less like cute literary banter and more like a working writer’s credo with a wink.

The genius is in the comparison. Reading is typically treated as receptive, noble, even hygienic; writing is positioned as labor, ego, or torment. Stout collapses that moral hierarchy and judges both by the simplest metric: fun. That word is doing the heavy lifting. It shrugs off the romantic mythology of suffering-for-art and replaces it with the cooler, more subversive claim that craft can be a form of play. For a mid-century genre writer often filed under "entertainment", it’s also a quiet flex: he’s telling you the work is serious because he takes enjoyment seriously.

The subtext is that reading and writing aren’t opposites but a feedback loop. Reading is the private version of building a world; writing is the public version of chasing the same thrill. The refusal to choose hints at an ideal creative life where input and output stay balanced, where the writer remains, first, an avid reader. It’s a line that deflates pretension without insulting art - an experienced hand insisting the point was never martyrdom, it was delight.