Robert Stone Quotes & Sayings

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. — Robert Stone

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

The mixtures of shells and light makes you confused and unhappy. One side employing the force of he other merging. You're one of those people who hears the sun come up. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

It's all about letting the story take over. — Robert Stone

The border between the State of Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip had always reminded him of the line between Tijuana and greater San Diego. There, too, ragged men the color of earth waited with the mystical patience of the very poor on the pleasure of crisply uniformed, well-nourished officials. Some months before, Lucas had come down for the dawn shape-up at the checkpoint, and he had not forgotten the drawn faces in the half-light, the terrible smiles of the weak, straining to make themselves agreeable to the strong. — Robert Stone

The desires of the heart ... are as crooked as a corkscrew. — Robert Stone

But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It's not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America. — Robert Stone

It's creepy, knowing someone might be watching me. Why do they need that? — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

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

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

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. — Robert Stone

Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

One does not consider style, because style is. — Robert Stone

The richest fuckin' people in the richest country in the world - you gonna tell them some little guy in a hole in South America can have something they can't? Like shit, man. If the little guy in the hole can be a revolutionary, they can be revolutionaries too. — Robert Stone

Don't be afraid to ask for a rise, Sagittarius. Your boss always pay you less than your work is actually worth! — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

It's hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

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

We are all self made although it's usually only the successful that tell you so. — Robert Stone

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

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. — Robert Stone

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

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

How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way. — Robert Stone

That's the great thing about literature
it makes the world less lonely. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

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

He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block — Robert Stone

He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither the good nor the fight was left to him ... he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it. — Robert Stone

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!" — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

I've been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this. — Robert Stone

I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in the big city. The original whore with the heart of gold. Used to be a nice Jewish girl, and the next thing you know, she's fucking the buckos of the Tenth Legion Fratensis, fucking the pilgrims who'd made their sacrifice at the Temple and were ready to party, the odd priest and Levite on the sly.
Maybe she was smart and funny. Certainly always on the lookout for the right guy to take her out of the life. Like a lot of whores, she tended towards religion. So along comes Jesus Christ, Mr. Right with a Vengeance, Mr. All Right Now! Fixes on her his hot, crazy eyes and she's all, Anything, I'll do anything. I'll wash your feet with my hair. You don't even have to fuck me. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

He sat desiring the girl - a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray. — Robert Stone

Life is a means of extracting fiction. — Robert Stone

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. — Robert Stone

The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessary. They contain many good things. Ironies. Insights. And yet they seem to have a certain ineffable unsatisfactoriness. There is a word to describe this quality, the writer thinks, a horrible word. The B word. He begins to strike his forehead with a sweaty palm. — Robert Stone

There's a current running and a pretty stiff offshore breeze." "Merde," said Freycinet again. He went forward along the rail and lay down beside the anchor windlass, peering into the chains. "He's a cook too," Gillian said, speaking softly. "How come you're not more like him?" "An accident of birth," Blessington said. "If we were married," she said, "you wouldn't have to skip on your visa." "Ah," said Blessington, "don't think it hasn't occurred to me. Nice to be a legal resident." "Legal my ass," she said. Freycinet suddenly turned and watched them. He showed them the squint, the bared canines. "What — Robert Stone

We carry nemesis inside us. — Robert Stone

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