Robert Stone famous quotes

03-17-2025

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

#Moving #Writing #Space
Itâ€™s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.
-- Robert Stone

#Acid #Mess
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

#Thinking #Judging #Firsts
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
-- Robert Stone

#Life #Mean #Fiction
That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.
-- Robert Stone

#Lonely #Literature #World
Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?
-- Robert Stone

#Running #Morning #Tomorrow
When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.
-- Robert Stone

#Moving #Writing #Cutting
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

#Giving Up #Typewriters #Smoking
If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.
-- Robert Stone

#Want #Havens #Knows
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

#Writing #Trying #Firsts
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

#Regret #Editors #Want
It's all about letting the story take over.
-- Robert Stone

#Letting Go #Stories
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

#Reading #Writing #Literature
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

#Passion #Night #Quality
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

#Hurt #Differences #Alive
One does not consider style, because style is.
-- Robert Stone

#Writing #Style #Doe
What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.
-- Robert Stone

#America #Worst
The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings.
-- Robert Stone

#Hurt #Teaching #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.
-- Robert Stone

#Dream #Writing #Creating
The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew.
-- Robert Stone

#Heart #Desire #Rafters
The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.
-- Robert Stone

#Want #Knows
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.’
-- Robert Stone

#Art #Real #Fiction
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

#Spiritual #Thinking #Attachment
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

#Dog #Morning #Light
I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.
-- Robert Stone

#Trying #Way #Novelists
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

#Kids #Stuff #Care

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