Robert Stone Quotes

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

History, then, is perceived as a rational process, the unfolding of a design, something with a dynamic to be uncovered.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

It's all about letting the story take over.

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

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.

We tell ourselves our own stories, selectively, in order to keep our sense of self intact.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We carry nemesis inside us.

My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn't optimism.

One does not consider style, because style is.

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.

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

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.

Sleeping and waking, the notion of being lost, of having wandered out of the right life, kept turning up in different guises. She imagined mirrors in which she could not find herself.

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.

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

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.

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