76 Quotes by Robert Stone

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.