Rex Stout Quotes

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone.

I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you're immortal.

It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

I don't think much about whether fans will remember me.

The real kiss of death - particularly with my father - is the extraordinary popularity of his work.

It's nice to be in anything that anybody sees or likes. If it's something that has lasted, it's great.

I don't want to be the next hottest thing, I want longevity.

As an artist, I never want to be a moment. I want to be a legacy, and I want my music to touch people for years to come.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he's gone, a few that are still being read, then he's accomplished quite a lot.

If any of my plays outlive me or get on library book shelves and somehow stay read, all of a sudden it's a testament to "that's part of our culture, that's part of our history."

I just want people to remember me a hundred years from now. I don't care that they're not able to quote any single line that I've written. But just that they can say, "Oh, he was a writer." That's sufficiently an honored position for me.

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I've inspired a few people one way or another.

I often daydream about the future, thinking of the world in 100, 200 years, imagining what it looks like, feels like. I hope that my books are like ghosts that will inhabit this future.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

My work is known by too few people for me to be remembered as a writer - that is, beyond those dedicated souls (bless them) who have followed the oeuvre through its various stages. To be realistic, when they and the last of my friends have died, I doubt I shall be remembered at all.

The measure of a great writer is not how many weeks his books spend on the best-seller lists, but how many years his books remain in print after his death.

It is different for us mortals. We are the ones who become old and grey. We are the ones who become worn at the seams and disappear. But not our dreams. They can live on in other people even after we have gone.

Over the years I have met a lot of important people, but no one as important as Elvis Presley.

Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.