One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter one's perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues
You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.
TOM ROBBINS, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.
TOM ROBBINS, Still Life with Woodpecker
Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool.
TOM ROBBINS, Villa Incognito
In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.
TOM ROBBINS, Skinny Legs and All
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.
TOM ROBBINS, Jitterbug Perfume
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, "In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe," New York Times, Dec. 30, 1993
Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.
TOM ROBBINS, Another Roadside Attraction
O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!
TOM ROBBINS, Still Life with Woodpecker
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
TOM ROBBINS, Reality Sandwich interview
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, interview, High Times, Jun. 12, 2002
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
TOM ROBBINS, Still Life with Woodpecker
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.
TOM ROBBINS, interview, January Magazine
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.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.
TOM ROBBINS, Jitterbug Perfume
The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism. Today, the religious right and the academic left seem to be in some kind of competition to brutalize the gene pool. As agents of homogenization, both sides are committed to institutionalized mediocrity. They want to re-create the world in their image, and re-create society to fit the contours of their fears.
TOM ROBBINS, "In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe," New York Times, Dec. 30, 1993
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail.
TOM ROBBINS, Villa Incognito
The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.
TOM ROBBINS, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.
TOM ROBBINS, Jitterbug Perfume
We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
TOM ROBBINS, Still Life with Woodpecker
To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.
TOM ROBBINS, Wild Ducks Flying Backward
I'm looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
TOM ROBBINS, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.
TOM ROBBINS, Still Life with Woodpecker
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.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.
TOM ROBBINS, Another Roadside Attraction
Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.
TOM ROBBINS, Another Roadside Attraction
In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred. Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.
TOM ROBBINS, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
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