Quotes from Tom Robbins

You've heard of people calling in sick. You may have called in sick a few times yourself. But have you ever thought about calling in well? It'd go like this: You'd get the boss on the line and say, "Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore." Call in well.

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

When we accept bad art because it's good politics, we're killing the swan to feed the chickens.

I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.

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.

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.

As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.

Live the beauty or your own reality.

Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. The furthest out you can go is the best place to be.

The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.'

Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.

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.

It was autumn, the springtime of death.

I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.

The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.

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

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

A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.

It's personal freedom, not hundred dollar bills that lights the soul's cigar.

Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom.

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.