Robert Stone may refer to:
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.
Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?
It's all about letting the story take over.
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.
I think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it.
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.
One does not consider style, because style is.
What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.
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 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.
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.
When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.
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 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.
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.
That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.
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. ’
The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings.
If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.