Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

I won't say there's a good Richard and a bad Richard, but I've got a switch, and when it clicks on, I'm somebody else.

If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.

In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Jekyll & Hyde,' the hero decides on the terms of his transformation in a process that's explained not through the supernatural but the natural or, at least, through biochemistry.

I'm Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Adrenaline makes me change.

Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.

O God! I screamed, and "O God! Again and again; for there before my eyes - pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death - there stood Henry Jekyll."

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

I wanted to write a play about double nature ... one that wouldn't be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It's not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It's something we've got to live with

I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way.

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

I do feel kind of like I have a split identity in that there's Van Jones, who has this big public role and tries to inspire millions of people to do new stuff together. And then there's just me: a pretty quiet, shy, retiring person.

Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

So then I though I'd make some plans, but Fire thought she'd really rather be Water instead.

I am a shark, Cassie," he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he's seeing me for the last time. "A shark who dreamed he was a man.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

There was about a two-year period at the end of the '60s, when I realized I was in the wrong place and entertaining the wrong people with the wrong material and that I was not being true to myself. I went through a metamorphosis into something more authentic for me, a more authentic stage voice and writing voice.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

Je est un autre. (I is someone else).

O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.