Robert Stone Quotes

Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

If you're a novelist, you have sort of themes that run throughout novels. You start a novel and you finish a novel. With record-making in the singer-songwriter world or whatever it is that I do, it's a little different because there is no specific arc that is necessarily, like it's not a concept record.

I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.

A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

The way I sometimes approach my work, when I look at a script for the first time, is to identify what the archetypes are and what the writing is trying to do in that context.

But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.