Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins
Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins is an American novelist. His best-selling novels are "seriocomedies", often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from carefully researched bizarre facts. His novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was made into a movie in 1993 by Gus Van Sant and stars Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 July 1932
CityBlowing Rock, NC
CountryUnited States of America
The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.
That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.
Time passed. Art came off the walls and became rituals. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present, mindless trajectory, could land those lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.
If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.
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.
Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s.
There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.
I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.
Growing up is a trap," snapped Dr. Robbins. "When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat.
What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.
People tend the take everything too seriously. Especially themselves. Yep. And that's probably what makes 'em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously.
Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall.
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.
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.