Paris Review Interview

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2845/robert-stone-the-art-of-fiction-no-90-robert-stone


Robert Stone, The Art of Fiction No. 90
Interviewed by William C. Woods
Issue 98, Winter 1985

Robert Stone lives in a small frame house on the Connecticut coast. Inside, a long white living room with curving walls suggests Oriental calm, and a pocket kitchen like a ship’s galley offers the comic sight of tame ducks feeding on the water just below. The hesitant phrases of the Modern Jazz Quartet chime from a battered stereo flanked by bookshelves filled with fiction, philosophy, and church history. Over a built-in sofa hangs an unframed poster for Who’ll Stop The Rain?, the film Stone coauthored from his second novel, Dog Soldiers. Stone and his wife Janice moved into this house in the fall of 1981; they have a son and daughter, grown and gone.

The novelist works in an attic room crowded with cardboard boxes and manuscripts and decorated with several brightly colored samples of Spanish religious art. At one end of the long room, a wide window affords a view of a gray October sea; another looks down on the gravel parking lot of a clam bar. Stone writes at a table only a little larger than the word processor it supports. When his office phone rings, it may be an editor on the line begging him to cover a story, a director seeking to interest him in a new part (in the summer of 1982, Stone played Kent in a professional production of King Lear in California), or an interviewer plaguing him with yet another question that he will answer with care and unfailing courtesy.

Although the Stones have lived in many parts of the country, and for four years in London, changes of locale have rarely altered the writer’s routine: “I get up very early, drink a pot of tea, and go for as long as I can.” Stone says he stops only when he has left himself a clear starting point for the following day. For weeks on end he will take few days off if his work is going well. “My imagination will still be functioning,” he says with a laugh, “twelve hours after my brain is dead.”