Quotes from Tom Robbins

Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East.

If God didn't prefer for us to drink at night, he wouldn't have made neon!

Logic only gives man what he needs," he stammered. "Magic gives him what he wants.

Life isn't simple; it's overwhelmingly complex. The love of simplicity is an escapist drug, like alcohol.

He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheists' picnic, but he bore down gently, intensifying his concentration, letting go of his attachment to gravity.

You can't rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn't it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it?

That's the value of the artist... Even when they aren't aware, they're dreaming our dreams for us.

IF THIS TYPEWRITER CAN'T DO IT, then fuck it, it can't be done.

The University of Pineapple is my alma papaya, I graduated mango cum laude.")

There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger.

In a voice that sounds the way a can of cheap dog food would sound if a can of cheap dog food could speak, he tells you you are looking well.

If creativity was enhanced by pacing the executive suites in a papier-mâché mask, it was all right with Claude, no matter how it frightened the secretaries.

The stiff-witted and academic seem not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the same instant, that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an affectionate glow in heart.

Claude could simply not imagine the couples he met at parties or passed on the street ever being locked in carnal embrace.

I don't think that a novel is supposed to be a guide book to happiness any more than it's supposed to be a journal of one's personal pain and frustration, which most novels are today, unfortunately. I think the novels that are most important are those that are more on the order of those coyotes that howl on the hills outside of town. Something mysterious and wild and hypnotic.

Switters had always seemed to take a both/and approach to life, as opposed to the more conventional and restrictive either/or.

Don't you see? The enemy represents Death to 'em. The government propaganda mills paint the enemy as an unfeelin', devourin' monster. So, when we go to war we go on a noble mission, a life-affirming mission, whose object is the destruction o' death. And 'tis precisely because we hate death so much that we're too crazed and irrational to see the irony in it. We hate death so bloody much that we will kill — and die — in order to try to halt its march.

There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness.

nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman's superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.

He said, 'The perfect taco.' That's it, those were his last words. He sighed, 'Ahhh,' and said, 'The perfect taco.

THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Someone once commented that I have a great thirst for knowledge, to which I replied, what the hell? I'll drink anything.

I see you've met Desire and Fulfillment...Regret is in the kitchen making coffee.