Tom Robbins Quotes

There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.

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

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

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

Most novelists write about twisted lives.

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

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.'

I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.

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

Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s.

This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter

If by the quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.

People of ze wurl, relax!

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.

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.

We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains.

There are two lost continents.... We are one: the lovers.

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

You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

I rather like the smell of absurdity in the morning.

…he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.

What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.

People aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.

I mean that gods do not limit men. Men limit men.

Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love.

Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore.

There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having... money in the bank.

You're better equipped for this world than I am," she said. "I'm always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.

Christianity... is an Eastern religion.

Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.

Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.

We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.

The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.

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?'

Eighty percent of love is smell.

I sweet potato what I sweet potato.

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

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

Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive.

What an electric heater perched upon the rim of the bathtub of the world that dead Jesus was.

Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.

His voice wore no pants.

Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

Consider the silent repose of the sausage as compared to the aggressiveness of bacon.

The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

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

The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human.

When we can converse with the animals, we will know the change is halfway here. When we can converse with the forest, we will know the change has come.