Tom Robbins Quotations

The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.

The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.

Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle - even though it cannot be solved - is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine.

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe.

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends.

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.

I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know.

I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.

In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.

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.

The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who've been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.

I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.

Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom.

To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'

To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

A child's mind is its living room; it's is going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.

The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.

If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.

A child's mind is its living room; it's going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.

We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.

The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don't do a lot of reading anymore except on tape.

There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.

I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.

I have never ever Googled myself, in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things.

One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires.

A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the 'mind of wonder.' There is not a lot of 'mind of wonder' writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that's what appeals to the readers who are my fans.

Life isn't stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can't have both. Take your choice. As for me, I'll choose a free, organic society over a rigid, artificial society any day.

Now tequila may be the favoured beverage of outlaws but that doesn't mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!

Ideas are mallable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse---and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it, until the last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.

We're proposing some stakes increases and more significant increases than the prior year. If the TOC agrees to those, that will take up some of that money. I think we will take a more aggressive approach to our overnights.

It is never too late to have a happy childhood

It is easier to play around with a man's wife than with his cliches.

Whining's unattractive, even when your whine sounds like Kenneth Branagh eating frozen strawberries with a silver fork.

We had a lot of young players this season. I thought they have improved over the course of the year. Overall, I have been pleased. As far as the sectional goes, I like our draw and I feel like we are playing our best basketball right now.

You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world's confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It's all part of a game to you, and you are delighted to play.

We've got something for just about everyone. I think our horsemen and our fans are going to be tickled with what we have to offer.

What is it that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, its exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism- as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons- Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.

I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.

Our Similarities bring us to a common ground; Our Differences allow us to be fascinated by each other

The narrow, no-nonsense skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.

That's for God sure. People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

As unrefined and basic as an animal's emotional equipment may be, it is not insensitive to freedom. Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.

It's been a positive thing for us. I think it's excellent.

The afternoon passed more slowly than a walnut-sized kidney stone.

Their desperate craving for simplicity sure can create complications. And their pitiful longing for certainty sure can make things unsteady.

Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?

The Friendship Center has brought together a lot of couples.

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.

There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue.

Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.

...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.

There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure, we can resist. But a knob that won't turn, a door that sticks and never budges, is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from our tight hinges, deprived of any other chance in life to swing open into unnecessary risk and thus into enchantment.

Look, America is no more a democracy than Russia is a Communist state. The governments of the U.S. and Russia are practically the same. There's only a difference of degree. We both have the same basic form of government: economic totalitarianism. In other words, the settlement to all questions, the solutions to all issues are determined not by what will make the people most healthy and happy in their bodies and their minds but by economics. Dollars or rubles.

I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the 25th of December.

Violence stinks no matter which side of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan.

Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.

I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.

Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating.

If we're ever going to get the world back on a natural footing, back in tune with natural rhythyms, if we're going to nurture the Earth and protect it and have fun with it and learn from it — which is what mothers do with their children — then we've got to put technology (an aggressive masculine system) in its proper place, which is that of a tool to be used sparingly, joyfully, gently and only in the fullest cooperation with nature. Nature must govern technology, not the other way around.

Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.

In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail.

To emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

A spirit cannot soar with only one wing.

In general, I've found female protagonists more intriguing to work with than males. I cherish women and have always preferred their company, reveling in their perfumes, their contours, their finer-grained sensibilities, lunar intuitions, nurturing instincts and relatively unfettered emotions--although I'm certainly not unaware that there are plenty of neurotic, uptight, stupid women in the world.