Tom Robbins Quotes

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.'

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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.'

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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?'

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

- Tom Robbins

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

- Tom Robbins

Education is for growth and fulfillment.

- Tom Robbins

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.

- Tom Robbins

Most novelists write about twisted lives.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.

- Tom Robbins

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

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

- Tom Robbins

A writer needs a life of introspection.

- Tom Robbins