Quotes by Tom Robbins

Now tequila may be the favored beverage of outlaws but that doesnt mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!

Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.

How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding ... are simply inauthentic... But there are folks who know and arent afraid to look and wont turn tail should they find it--and if they never do, theyll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth or the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earths sweet gas.

Dont confuse symmetry with balance.

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. Its unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.

She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.

If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, thats perfectly valid - but dont go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.

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.

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

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 doesnt, but she always knows where Ill be. She doesnt need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, its the cyanide.

The brutal truth is, were 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 were doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

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.

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.