Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins

Novelist, Essayist

Tom Robbins is an American author known for his playful and unconventional novels, such as 'Jitterbug Perfume', which explore themes of freedom and creativity.

People Thinking Writing Men Still Life With Woodpecker Book
Born
July 22, 1932
Quotes
519
Rank
#566

Quote collection

Tom Robbins quotes (page 25 of 26)

519 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Tom Robbins Novelist, Essayist
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"For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass."

Self People Giving
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"Not naive,' Conch shell had corrected him. 'He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

Shells Taught Naive
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"The first thunderstorm of the season was in the dressing room, donning its black robes and its necklace of hailstones, strapping on its electrical sword."

Black Necklaces Rooms
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"I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis."

Writing Novelists Neurosis
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"If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres."

Book Names Want
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"Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall."

Writing Long Fiction
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"I work with pen and paper. That's my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There's something about that process that's so organic."

Writing Ink Paper
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"My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function."

Crazy Night Genius
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"The female characters in my books tend to be independent, frisky, spunky, witty, emotionally strong, erotically daring, spiritually oriented and intellectually generous; in short, the kind of women I admire in real life."

Witty Strong Real
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"The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn't going to change just because we've gone electronic. What is changing is that now we're allowing corporations to tell our stories for us."

Race Gone Stories
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"I don't want to give the impression that I hold daily conversations with my household appliances, although my toaster is as old as Drew Barrymore and almost as talented."

Giving Toasters Want
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"The goal of this generation's pioneers should be to restrict procreation and limit consumption. They should also take every opportunity to make themselves happy, realizing that the key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously."

Opportunity Self Keys
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"I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage."

Book Writing Journey
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"I have never ever Googled myself, in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things."

Christian Thinking Facts
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"Jackson Pollock said once, "I don't really feel that many people in this world are alive." He said, "That's why I like you, Tom. You're alive.""

I Like You People Alive
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"Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years."

Christian Two Years
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"I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction."

Art Writing Thinking
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"Life is too small a container for certain individuals. Some of them, such as Alobar, huff and puff and try to expand the container. Others, such as Kudra, seek to pry the lid off and hop out."

Trying Puff Life Is
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"What an electric heater perched upon the rim of the bathtub of the world that dead Jesus was."

Jesus World Electric
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