Top 66 Tom Robbins Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

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

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.

Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.

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.

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

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

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.

Well, I have never, ever Googled myself.

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

A writer needs a life of introspection.

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

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

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

Well, I have never, ever Googled myself.

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

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.

A writer needs a life of introspection.

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

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

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.

Reality is contradictory. And it’s paradoxical.

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

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.

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

Education is for growth and fulfillment.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Reality is contradictory. And it’s paradoxical.

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

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

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.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

Writing is the hardest physical work there is.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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

Education is for growth and fulfillment.

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

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

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