Welcome to our collection of quotes by Tom Robbins. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Tom Robbins
Thomas Eugene Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist. His best-selling novels are "seriocomedies" (also known as "comedy-drama"). His novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was made into a movie in 1993 by Gus Van Sant and stars Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.
Once one pays some attention to something, then you begin to see evidence of it everywhere.
The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.
Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them deadlines.
Redheaded women! Those blood oranges! Those cherry bombs! Those celestial shrews! And queens of copp! ode to redheads.
You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.
If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.
In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.
The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.
The very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance.
What I've learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously.
As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.
They accepted my donation, so they're aware they'd better serve my interests or I'll buy some leadership that will.
Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.
A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.
The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.
No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft.
Since when has leadership been a criterion for sanity? Or vice versa. Hitler was a gifted leader, even Nixon. Exhibit leadership qualities as an adolescent, they pack you off to law school for an anus transplant. If it takes, you go into government.
We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains.
How can men be such lummoxes, such wads of chewing gum on our ballet slippers and still feel so good?
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.
I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.
Love is the ultimate outlaw.
Longer Version:
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.
I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.
Was he becoming paranoid?
No. At least not when compared to Skeeter Washington, who, admiring the stars one evening on the deck of Poe's boat, was heard to say, If the universe be expanding, they gotta be something chasing it.
We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
They were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address.
I work with pen and paper. That's my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There's something about that process that's so organic.
We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake. p. 174.
Cant you understand that romanticism is no more an enemy of science than mysticism is? In fact, romanticism and science are good for each other. The scientist keeps the romantic honest and the romantic keeps the scientist human.
Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas.
Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool.
Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.
Alas, Gulietta, this was an American frog of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a time when wishing apparently no longer led to anything, and Leigh-Cheri eventually named it Prince Charming after that son-of-a-bitch who never comes though.
To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else.
I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man's primary problems aren't political; they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.
I like travelers, but I don't like tourists. The difference is that travelers don't shop and they don't play golf.
A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.
To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry; to the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its music; to the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace.
Life's an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can't tolerate offense ought to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense ought to have it ended for them.
When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act.
Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve towards a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being.
Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.
Not a fighter an adventurer. He doesn't attack, he engages; He doesn't defend, he expands; He doesn't destroy, he transforms; He doesn't reject, he explores.
One tended to lose one's bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.
She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.
This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.
How can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointment can bring?
Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love.
If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.
I have never ever Googled myself, in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things.
The female characters in my books tend to be independent, frisky, spunky, witty, emotionally strong, erotically daring, spiritually oriented and intellectually generous; in short, the kind of women I admire in real life.
I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.
It's good to bear in mind that like it or not, enlightenment has always been, even in a golden age, pretty much limited to an elite.
Laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.
You wonder if God doesn't have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you?
As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the call of nature will be answered by a machine.
A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.
First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life.
