Tom Robbins Quotes & Sayings

Both money and art powdered as they are with the romance and poetry of the age are magic. Rather money is magic art is magik. Money is stagecraft slight of hand a bag of clever tricks. Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links. Admittedly the line between the two can be as thin as a dime. — Tom Robbins

[R]ed hair is slow to lay back once it's got its dandruff up, and her bitchy mood required further opportunity to express itself. — Tom Robbins

They were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address. — Tom Robbins

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences. — Tom Robbins

Now I'd fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne. — Tom Robbins

The most important thing in life is style. That is the style of one s existence the characteristic mode of one s actions is basically ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing then style is doubly definitive because style describes the doing. The point is this happiness is a learned condition. And since it is learned and self generating it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation. This throws a very ironic light on content. And underscores the primacy of style. It is content or rather the consciousness of content that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us to move us it is style that makes us care. — Tom Robbins

It's been said that golf is a Zen activity. I'd argue that if golfers were practicing Zen, they wouldn't keep score. — Tom Robbins

I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings, a passion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners. — Tom Robbins

And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that? — Tom Robbins

Beer's nice for being glad and dizzy, and sometimes for the mystery and stuff, but the happy that comes out of a beer can is not like the real happy you got to make in your heart. — Tom Robbins

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're scrambled. — Tom Robbins

It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful ... — Tom Robbins

If there's a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn't exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn't have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that's it. That's all an artist does. — Tom Robbins

Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive. — Tom Robbins

Okay, it is what it is and I am what I it, but its isness and my itness seem to be stretching the meaning of "is" and "it. — Tom Robbins

The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our "hump" - that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable - that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes. — Tom Robbins

I love hot hand of explosion. I love a breeze perfumed with the devil smell of powder. — Tom Robbins

I've begun to picture my abdominal cavity occupied instead by a single glowing globe, — Tom Robbins

There's nothing like the word dangerous to generate interest: it's irresistible to young males, scary to most young females. — Tom Robbins

But, Foley, my lad, it isn't beauty per se that makes wire-walking Zen or makes it art. It's the extremity of the risks that are assumed by each exquisite gesture, each impossible somersault. Here's a more extreme version of the dangerous beauty bullfights used to possess before the matadors became preening cowards and stacked the desk against the beasts. We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake, and I mean something more consequential than money or reputation. The great value of a high-wire act is that it has no practical value. The fact that so much skill and effort and courage can be directed into something so ostensibly useless is what makes it useful. That's what affords it the power to lift us out of context and carry us-elsewhere. — Tom Robbins

You know what the game of golf is, don't you? It's basketball for people who can't jump and chess for people who can't think. — Tom Robbins

Love is dope, not chicken soup. — Tom Robbins

What are the odds that two separate writers, strangers, a thousand miles apart, would each invent fictions in which guys take girls to an esoteric frog lecture on their first date? If that isn't synchronicity, it's something equally as weird. — Tom Robbins

This lonely, uncompromising, obsessive tug-of-war with presumed reality, this is what art is all about. — Tom Robbins

If he weren't a stick his own self, I'd say he had a stick up his butt. — Tom Robbins

The purpose of art is to provide what life does not. — Tom Robbins

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak. — Tom Robbins

The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown
laughed at, persecuted and despised
playing out the dumb show at his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority. — Tom Robbins

The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion. — 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

What I love most about Jerusalem is that it's not about money." "Pardon?" "New York here is a city about money. L.A.'s about money. Las Vegas is about money. Dallas the same. Tokyo and London, Milan, Zurich, Singapore, the whole reason for them is money. Tel Aviv's about money. But Jerusalem, it's not about money." "He is absolutely right," put in Abu. "Jerusalem is about ... something else. — Tom Robbins

To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous. — Tom Robbins

To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling ... At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female ... Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses. — Tom Robbins

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. — Tom Robbins

They coil around each other, the light and the darkness, and they absorb each other continuously, yet they never cancel each other out. — Tom Robbins

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. — Tom Robbins

Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like flesh. Water will not stand still. It is always off to somewhere else; restless, talkative, and curious. Even water in a covered jar will disappear in time. Flesh is water. Stones are like bones. Satisfied. Patient. Dependable. Tell me, then, Alobar, in order to achieve immortality, should you emulate water or stone? Should you trust your flesh or your bones? — Tom Robbins

Larry, wouldn't it be a fine thing, a swell thing, a boon to the community of man and to all creatures great and small, if this girl's soul was as ripe and stunning as her ass. — Tom Robbins

According to Hindu cosmology, we're in the kali yuga, a dark period when the cow of history is balanced precariously on one leg, soon to topple. Then there are our new-age friends who believe that this December we're in for a global cage-rattling which, once the dust has settled, will usher in a great spiritual awakening. Most of this apocalyptic noise appears to be just wishful thinking on the part of people who find life too messy and uncertain for comfort, let alone for serenity and mirth. — Tom Robbins

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. — Tom Robbins

AS THE AFTERNOON PROGRESSES, our shadows grow longer. At night, in the dark, we become our shadows. — Tom Robbins

To behave as if the thermostats on their imaginations were set permanently on high. — Tom Robbins

Despite his title, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; to cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn't understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife's body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head. — Tom Robbins

Life is hard - if you think it's hard. — Tom Robbins

Virtually every advancement made by our species since civilization first peeked out of its nest of stone has been initiated by lone individuals, mavericks who more often than not were ignored, mocked, or viciously persecuted by society and its institutions. — Tom Robbins

Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark — Tom Robbins

Do you hear, darlink, what the new dishwasher wants to be called? An 'underwater ceramics engineer,' already! Abu doesn't believe his ears. He doesn't realize what a big shot he used to be in the kitchen. Ha! — Tom Robbins

Approfondement is a French word that means 'playing easily in the deep.' — Tom Robbins

It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good dea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comps out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended." 86 — 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

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art. — Tom Robbins

Whenever I finish a book, I go off and have some kind of adventure. Having had an adventure in my writing chair or on my writing sofa, an internal adventure, then I need to balance that off with an external adventure, so I'll go tramping through Africa or whitewater rafting or float to Hawaii in a martini shaker or something. — Tom Robbins

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong. — Tom Robbins

Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right — Tom Robbins

Muddy Waters he play in the river Joan Rivers she play in the mud Swami guru play in a big salad bowl Counting lettuce and chewing his cud — Tom Robbins

To wit: actions, like sounds, divide the flow of time into beats.[ ... ]The quality of a man's life depends on the rhyhmic structure he is able to impose upon the input and output of energy. — Tom Robbins

Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue. — Tom Robbins

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer. — Tom Robbins

The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion. — Tom Robbins

In East of Eden, John Steinbeck wrote that there's never been a great creative collaboration. When the Beatles first burst on the scene, I thought they were proving him wrong. Later, we learned that Lennon and McCartney had each composed their pop masterpieces separately, individually. So it goes. — Tom Robbins

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. — Tom Robbins

Cowgirl Interlude (Bonanza Jellybean)
She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet.
Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire int he woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. "Self-defense," she pleaded, when her parents complained. "It was a [sic] out-law tennis shoe.
Billy the Ked. — Tom Robbins

Is this blasphemy, my lord?"
"I think not. Those who crafted me, be they gods or demons, crafted this mind that shapes my resistance to their schemes. Surely they were wise enough, at the wheel where I was thrown, to anticipate future resistance in the heart they were abuilding. — Tom Robbins

Since moving to New York, she had been gradually abandoning her old ideas about the nobility of suffering. — Tom Robbins

We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves. — Tom Robbins

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality. — Tom Robbins

Can I drink more than one mai tai without taking on the aroma of an aroused butterly? — 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

The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism. — Tom Robbins

Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever - which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes. — Tom Robbins

Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets. — Tom Robbins

There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong. — Tom Robbins

The rougher the world gets around me, the sweeter I seem to myself. — Tom Robbins

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning. — Tom Robbins

A sneeze travels at a peak velocity of two hundred miles per hour. A burp, more slowly; a fart, slower yet. But a kiss thrown by fingers- its departure is sudden, its arrival ambiguous, and there is no source that can state with authority what speeds are reached in its flight. — Tom Robbins

Someone once commented that I have a great thirst for knowledge, to which I replied, What the hell? I'll drink anything. — Tom Robbins

And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder. — Tom Robbins

But do we know how to make love stay?'
I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day. — Tom Robbins

(1) When a situation has become too frustrating, a quandary too persistently insolvable; when dealing with the issue is generating chronic discontent, infringing on freedom, and inhibiting growth, it may be time to quit beating one's head against the wall, reach for a big fat stick of metaphoric dynamite, light the fuse, and blast the whole unhappy business nine miles past oblivion. (2) After making an extreme effort, after pulling out all the stops, one is still unable to score Tibetan peach pie, take it as a signal to relax, grin, pick up a fork, and go for a slice of the apple. — Tom Robbins

Pan is right," he thought. "Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing. — Tom Robbins

Poor little babies are so afraid of pain that they spurn the myriad sweet wonders of life so that they might protect themselves from hurt. How can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring? — Tom Robbins

There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act. — Tom Robbins

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity. — Tom Robbins

Once, in a spasm of sappiness, you asked Q-Jo if she thought your dreams would ever come true. 'You aren't talking about dreams,' she corrected you, 'you're referring to your pathetic bourgeoisie ambitions. Dreams don't come true. Dreams are true. — Tom Robbins

As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine. — 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

Your petal from the salty rose — Tom Robbins

If I have been given any gift in this life, it's my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination. — Tom Robbins

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation. — Tom Robbins

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

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good. Moreover, a lout thrashing about in the clear waters of wisdom will dirty those waters for everyone else. — Tom Robbins

Wasn't crying. I've had a bad day. Another one. One in a series of bad days. I'm not complaining. Bad days are my bag. They're time-consuming, however, and I'm a busy girl. — Tom Robbins

In addition, Dr. Dannyboy has suggested a fifth element: positive thinking. Pointing out that their breathing, bathing, dining and screwing brought Alobar and Kudra much physical pleasure, and that an organism steeped in pleasure is an organism disposed to continue, he has said that the will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity. Indeed Dr. Dannyboy goes so far as to claim that ninety percent of all deaths are suicides. Persons, says Wiggs, who lack curiosity about life, who find minimal joy in existence, are all too willing, subconsciously, to cooperate with- and attract- disease, accident and violence. — Tom Robbins

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. — Tom Robbins

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. — Tom Robbins

Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come. — Tom Robbins

There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness. — Tom Robbins

You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans. — Tom Robbins

Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. — Tom Robbins

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. — Tom Robbins