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
reading thinking focus
I think too much is known about me already. I think biographical information can get in the way of the reading experience. The interchange between the reader and the work. For example, I know far too much about Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Because I know as much as I do about their personal lives, I can't read their work without this interjecting itself. So if I had it to do over, I'd probably go the way of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. And just stay out of it altogether and let all the focus be on the work itself and not on me.
thinking ideas mind
And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?
educational philosophy thinking
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.
philosophical home thinking
The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.
thinking two romance
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.
thinking want miserable
salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.
buddhist thinking desire
The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.
mother spiritual thinking
A Hamburger is warm and fragrant and juicy. A hamburger is soft and nonthreatening. It personifies the Great Mother herself who has nourished us from the beginning. A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes. A hamburger is companionable and faintly erotic. The nipple of the Goddess, the bountiful belly-ball of Eve. You are what you think you eat.
thinking life-is-hard ifs
Life is hard if you think it's hard.
thinking hamburgers
You are what you think you eat.
children cowboy thinking
It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets.It weepsfor the black people who think like white people.It weepsfor the Indians who think like settlers.It weepsfor the children who think like adults.It weepsfor the free who think like prisoners.Most of all, it weepsfor the cowgirls who think like cowboys.
thinking disease aging
I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.
philosophical reality thinking
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical. If there's any one word -- if you had to pick one word to describe the nature of the universe -- I think that word would be paradox. That's true at the subatomic level, right through sociological, psychological, philosophical levels on up to cosmic levels.
prayer wall thinking
If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.