I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.
— Tom Robbins
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.
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.
My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.
I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know.
We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
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.
A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.
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.
I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic.
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.
A writer needs a life of introspection.
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.
Education is for growth and fulfillment.
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.
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.
A child's mind is its living room; it's going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.
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.'
At the typewriter you find out who you are.
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.
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.
Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.
Most novelists write about twisted lives.
Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.
If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.
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.'
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.
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.
Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom.
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.
A child's mind is its living room; it's is going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.
There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.
If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.
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.
I have never ever Googled myself; in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things.
Writing is the hardest physical work there is.
I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends.
The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.
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.
I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.
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?'
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.
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 ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.
Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.
When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.
Well, I have never, ever Googled myself.
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.
