Robert Stone Quotes

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.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It's all about letting the story take over.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One does not consider style, because style is.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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