Paris Review Roger Stone

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to ask a little about your evolution as a writer.

STONE

My early life was very strange. I was a solitary; radio fashioned my imagination. Radio narrative always has to embody a full account of both action and scene. I began to do that myself. When I was seven or eight, I’d walk through Central Park like Sam Spade, describing aloud what I was doing, becoming both the actor and the writer setting him into the scene. That was where I developed an inner ear.

INTERVIEWER

So you grew up in New York?

STONE

For the most part we were in New York, my mother and I. It was just the two of us. My mother was, I now realize, schizophrenic, and sometimes she was better than at other times. She lost a job as a schoolteacher in New York for medical reasons; she had a very small pension, and when she was very ill, there was really no place for me to go. Except this place that was, well, it functioned partly as a day school. My mother was in and out of hospitals. I was in an orphanage run by the Marist brothers from the age of six until just before I was ten.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder how her schizophrenia influenced your imagination.

STONE

I wonder that too. I am not really sure. One thing I know is that I usually can recognize schizophrenics when I see them. There is a certain way of speaking. I am talking about functioning schizophrenics, professional people; there are a lot of them around. It is very hard to talk about it in the abstract. In California, years ago, I had a doctor who would tell me these rather askew anecdotes that didn’t seem to have any point. What it reminded me of was my mother’s disconnection. Their associative patterns seemed to be similar. I finally realized what his problem was. He was about halfway into another kind of reality, but at the same time he was a doctor, functioning as a GP.