Tom Robbins
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.Collection: Love
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.Collection: Government
Education is for growth and fulfillment.Collection: Education
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.Collection: Humor
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Romantic
Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.Collection: Equality
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.Collection: Freedom
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.Collection: Imagination
I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.Collection: Science
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Morning
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Life
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.
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.
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.
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.
I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
At the typewriter you find out who you are.
We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.
Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.
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.
If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.
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.
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.
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.
Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.
To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
Most novelists write about twisted lives.
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.
The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.
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.
I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know.
A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.
When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.
In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.
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.
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.
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.
I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic.
The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.
A child's mind is its living room; it's going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.
I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.
My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.
When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.