Robert Stone Quotations

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One is improvising when one writes, and you pick up in the same way a musician starts to improvise and detect the inner structure of what he's playing - that's the way it works in the writing of a novel. You pick up the beat.

I am trying - in a good cause - to crowd people out of their own minds and occupy their space. I want them to stop being themselves for the moment, I want them to stop thinking, and I want to occupy their heads.

I thought a lot about my attitude toward the world, toward fear and violence, and that I had something to say about these things. If you had asked me then what I was writing about, I would have said, in a kind of Kerouac-like romantic vein, 'America.'

There is a certain reverence for the sociopath as a major cultural type in American society, along with the frontiersman, the puritan and the outlaw.

We believe scale, low cost, high capacity growth, high quality, and domestic supply relationships make it an attractive global solar ... play.

Even though drug mysticism is a vulgarization of the real thing, I think it made me come to terms with my own religious impulses.

Progress in restructuring and solid operational performance at the new Thailand facility bode well for margins.

It's just devastation. I'm tickled nobody was hurt.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

It's all about letting the story take over.

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.

One does not consider style, because style is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.