Top 35 Robert Stone Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you haven’t fought for your life for something you want, you don’t know what’s life all about.”

— Robert Stone

2. “It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.”

— Robert Stone

3. “That’s the great thing about literature – it makes the world less lonely.”

— Robert Stone

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “It’s easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it.”

— Robert Stone

14. “One does not consider style, because style is.”

— Robert Stone

15. “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

16. “When rewriting, move quickly. It’s a little like cutting your own hair.”

— Robert Stone

17. “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

18. “It’s all about letting the story take over.”

— Robert Stone

19. “The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings.”

— Robert Stone

20. “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

21. “I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.”

— Robert Stone

22. “Life is a means of extracting fiction.”

— Robert Stone

23. “Everybody’s after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?”

— Robert Stone

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

— Robert Stone

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn’t export.”

— Robert Stone

30. “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.”

— Robert Stone

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Robert Stone

34. “See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts.”

— Robert Stone

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

— Robert Stone

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

— Robert Stone

37. “One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.”

— Robert Stone

38. “There’s an Arab blessing,” Converse informed them, “’May the poetry of your love never turn to prose.”

— Robert Stone