Tom Robbins Quotes

1932–2025 United States

Thomas Eugene Robbins (July 22, 1932 – February 9, 2025) was an American novelist. His novels are complex, often wild stories with strong social undercurrents and obscure but well-researched details.

United States
Journalists
Novelists
Satirists

Also known as: Robbins, Tom, Still Life with Woodpecker

Random Tom Robbins quote

127 quotes

Humor can be a doorway into the deepest reality, and wit and playfulness are a desperately serious transcendence of evil.

High Times interview (2002)

Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

"This is the way to burn," the fuse seemed to be saying to the more docile, slow-witted candlewick. "Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn."

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

The shaman lives outside the social system, refusing to have any part of it. Yet he seems to connect the populace to the heavens and the earth far more directly than the priest.

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work.

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

They snuggled closer, and when they were as close as they could get without being behind one another, they commenced to kiss again.

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

I'm descended from a long line of preachers and policemen.

High Times interview (2002)

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

"Who knows how to make love stay?"

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

"Not naive," Conch Shell had corrected him, "He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear."

Skinny Legs and All (1990)

This baby (the Remington SL3 typewriter) speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard.

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Individualism is bad for business – though absolutely necessary for freedom, progressive knowledge, and any possible interface with the transcendent. And yes, it's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism.

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

A rabbi's dog could score pork chops in the streets of Tel Aviv easier than Bernard could acquire tequila in King County Jail.

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

"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?"

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction.

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Tom Robbins (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.