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Tom Robbins [1936-0] American

Rank: 101
Author, Novelist

Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins is an American novelist. His best-selling novels are "seriocomedies", often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from carefully researched bizarre facts.

Love, Imagination, Business, Change, Death, Equality, Freedom, Funny, Government, Humor, Intelligence, Morning, Romantic, Science, Time, Wisdom

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.		101
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.	Love	102
I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.		103
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.	Love, Time	104
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.		105
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.		106
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.	Change	107
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.	Freedom	108
The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.		109
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.	Business, Government	110
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.	Intelligence	111
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.	Love	112
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.		113
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.	Death	114
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.	Romantic	115
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.	Funny	116
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.		117
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.'	Imagination	118
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.		119
I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.	Science	120
Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.		121
I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know.		122
I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends.		123
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.		124
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.		125
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.	Imagination	126
A writer needs a life of introspection.		201
Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.		202
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.		203
Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.		204
In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.		205
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.		206
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.		207
Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom.		208
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.		209
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.'		210
The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.		211
To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.		212
A child's mind is its living room; it's is going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.		213
The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.		214
Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.		215
At the typewriter you find out who you are.		216
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.		217
Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.	Equality	218
I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic.		219
When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.		220
If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.		221
Education is for growth and fulfillment.		222
When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.		223
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.	Morning	224
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.	Humor, Wisdom	225
We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.		226
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.		301
A child's mind is its living room; it's going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.		302
If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.		303
A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.		304
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?'		305
Most novelists write about twisted lives.		306
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.		307
My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.		308
Writing is the hardest physical work there is.		309
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.		310
There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.		311
I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.		312
Well, I have never, ever Googled myself.		313
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.		314
I have never ever Googled myself; in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things.		315

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