Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.”

— Tom Robbins

352. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more disoriented and alone. Or more thoroughly, serenely, at home. Every true romantic will know what I mean.”

— Tom Robbins

353. “When we accept bad art because it’s good politics, we’re killing the swan to feed the chickens.”

— Tom Robbins

354. “Solace? That’s why God made fermented beverages and the blues.”

— Tom Robbins

355. “He who jokes in the executioners face can be destroyed, but never defeated.”

— Tom Robbins

356. “The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don’t do a lot of reading anymore except on tape.”

— Tom Robbins

Featured in: Reading Quotes

357. “Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.”

— Tom Robbins

Featured in: Real Quotes

358. “Magic things are fond of deceptions.”

— Tom Robbins

359. “As they say in my country, have a nice day.”

— Tom Robbins

360. “My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well.”

— Tom Robbins

361. “What was it like in there? Inside a daisy?” My answer: “Like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.”

— Tom Robbins

362. “Every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation.”

— Tom Robbins

363. “In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one.”

— Tom Robbins

364. “I don’t want to give the impression that I hold daily conversations with my household appliances, although my toaster is as old as Drew Barrymore and almost as talented.”

— Tom Robbins

365. “And it rained a screaming. And it rained a rawness. And it rained a plasma. And it rained a disorder.”

— Tom Robbins

366. “Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call “the sixties.”

— Tom Robbins

367. “Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it’s living in Paris in the ’30s.”

— Tom Robbins

368. “The Middle Ages hangs over history’s belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.”

— Tom Robbins

369. “Beer’s nice for being glad and dizzy, and sometimes for the mystery and stuff, but the happy that comes out of a beer can is not like the real happy you got to make in your heart.”

— Tom Robbins

370. “You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.”

— Tom Robbins

371. “A thing is good because it is good, not because it is natural. A thing is bad because it is bad, not because its artificial. It is not a damn iota better to be bitten by a rattlesnake than shot by a gun.”

— Tom Robbins

372. “Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on them arrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.”

— Tom Robbins

373. “Was it wife soup and husband soup on the Other Side? Or was it simply soup?”

— Tom Robbins

374. “Don’t you see? The enemy represents Death to ‘em. The government propaganda mills paint the enemy as an unfeelin’, devourin’ monster. So, when we go to war we go on a noble mission, a life-affirming mission, whose object is the destruction o’ death. And ‘tis precisely because we hate death so much that we’re too crazed and irrational to see the irony in it. We hate death so bloody much that we will kill – and die – in order to try to halt its march.”

— Tom Robbins

375. “It’s hard to say who’s a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.”

— Tom Robbins

376. “We are seldom as limited as we think we are.”

— Tom Robbins

377. “If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense.”

— Tom Robbins

378. “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.”

— Tom Robbins

379. “To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.”

— Tom Robbins

380. “We approach the divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains.”

— Tom Robbins

381. “Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.”

— Tom Robbins

382. “Sissy Hankshaw once taught a parakeet to hitchhike.”

— Tom Robbins

383. “Jerusalem was where it all went down, man. It was connected to heaven like Spanish Harlem was connected to Puerto Rico.”

— Tom Robbins

384. “Toys are made in heaven, batteries are made in hell.”

— Tom Robbins

385. “Enlightened and endarkened. The ultimate.”

— Tom Robbins

386. “One of the other musicians said that the tambourine is a female due to the fact that it makes a pretty jingle and is designed to be spanked. That is the more recent, patriarchal attitude, I suppose.”

— Tom Robbins

387. “My grandmother,” he said, “confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise.”

— Tom Robbins

388. “Now I’d fallen into it like a drunk hobo falling into a vat of champagne.”

— Tom Robbins

389. “To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.”

— Tom Robbins

390. “Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people’s eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers as they were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society...”

— Tom Robbins

391. “I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum.”

— Tom Robbins

392. “Hemingway and Norman Mailer might have disagreed, but there is no heavyweight champion of literature.”

— Tom Robbins

393. “This darling Marvelous has eaten at many tables and has not been nourished.”

— Tom Robbins

394. “Wasn’t it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice?”

— Tom Robbins

395. “I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.”

— Tom Robbins

396. “The Japanese have become so smitten with the Western condiment – its texture as silky as a kimono, its tang as understated as the tang of Zen – that today they have a word for mayonnaise junkie: mayora.”

— Tom Robbins

397. “If you want your tree to produce plenty o’ fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin’.”

— Tom Robbins

398. “First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life.”

— Tom Robbins

Featured in: Firsts Quotes, Quotes About Stories

399. “I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.”

— Tom Robbins

400. “The clown is a creature of chaos.”

— Tom Robbins