Quotes from Robert Stone

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.

I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner.

It's creepy, knowing someone might be watching me. Why do they need that?

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

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.

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

One bright afternoon, near a place called Krek, Converse had watched with astonishment as the world of things transformed itself into a single overwhelming act of murder. In a manner of speaking he had discovered himself. Himself was a soft shell-less quivering thing encased in a hundred and sixty pounds of pink sweating meat. It was real enough. It tried to burrow into the earth. It wept.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We carry nemesis inside us.

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.

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.

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

But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It's not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.

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.

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.