Robert Stone Quotes

It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it

I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.

I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.

Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?

I think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America

The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry.

What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.

I start early in the morning. I'm usually out in the woods with the dog as soon as it gets light; then I drink a whole lot of tea and start as early as I can, and I go as long as I can.

You should let dialogue get as nearly out of control as you can. Characters should say what they say to each other instead of what they mean to say. The worst purpose of dialogue is to elicit information: "You know why we're out on this space station, Carruthers - to save the universe!"

I think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

One does not consider style, because style is.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

I was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway.

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.

The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings.

It's all about letting the story take over.

If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.

I've always remembered. This fellow said to me - if you think someones'doing you wrong, it's not for you to judge. Kill them first and then God can do the judging.

You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it.

I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.

When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.

The reason I was able to give up smoking was because of the computer. You couldn't lean a cigarette on a computer, like you could on a typewriter. So it just made it that much more difficult to smoke. So I quit.

The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew.

That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.

I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.