Quotes from Robert Stone

Don't be afraid to ask for a rise, Sagittarius. Your boss always pay you less than your work is actually worth!

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.

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

He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither the good nor the fight was left to him . . . he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.

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

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.

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.

He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block

So they locked me up," Danskin said. "I feigned madness. I babbled, I recited Heine. Nine years. Here I am." They rode in silence for a while. "But you're still pissed off." "Now more than ever.

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

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.

What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.

Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?

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.

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.

It's all about letting the story take over.