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
If little else, the brain is an educational toy. Why it may be a frustrating play thing - one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them - it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled. [...] Alas! the brain is a toy that plays games of its own. Its very most favorite game is the one-thing-leads-to-another game.
This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.
There are two lost continents.... We are one: the lovers.
'Neotenty' is 'remaining young,' and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it.
Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.
Nobody quite knew what to make of the moon any more.
The afternoon passed more slowly than a walnut-sized kidney stone.
Their desperate craving for simplicity sure can create complications. And their pitiful longing for certainty sure can make things unsteady.
What is it that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, its exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism- as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons- Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.
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.
The narrow, no-nonsense skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.
That's for God sure. People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
Our Similarities bring us to a common ground; Our Differences allow us to be fascinated by each other
Ideas are mallable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse---and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it, until the last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.