Tom Robbins Quotes

“Sitting around waiting for inspiration is for amateurs. If you’re a professional, you show up every day at work.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“More significantly, I’ve had the great good fortune to know women (strong, smart, soulful, lustful, “larger than life”) not unlike the female protagonists in my novels. If I portray such women accurately, it’s only because I’ve paid attention.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“The thing that you dislike the most, that bugs you the most, that scares you the most — that’s what you need to go do.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“I don’t elucidate it. I don’t praise myself. I just have this feeling inside that that sentence went well.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“and those particular passages may have encouraged receptive readers to wake up, embrace risk, love wholeheartedly, revere nature, reject authority, and never take themselves too seriously.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“In my rare visits to writers conferences, the first thing I say to aspiring writers is that you need to stop thinking about getting published and start thinking about getting better. If you make the work good enough, it will get published.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“I spend a lot of time alone, which is good for a writer. It keeps you from secondhand ideas and secondhand thoughts.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“MA: Yep, you are going to sign up for some reality show now. TR: [Laughs.] I actually have an idea for a reality show that I want to pitch next time I’m out in L.A. It’s called “Fungi for the Straight Guy.” MA: Tell me. TR: Each week, we would take a middle-aged man, a corporate worker from suburbia, and give him a heroic dose of psychedelic mushrooms and then follow him around with a camera for 12 hours to see what he does.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“The trick is to be internally at peace even as externally we, with our secret monkey wrenches and our subversive jujitsu, rage against the machine,”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“That’s why I’m worried about kids who spend so much time on social media. How are they going to develop as individuals? It’s all communication and no revelation.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“No. You don’t ever come back the same. That would be a bad trip, if you took it and came back the same.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“Do you think we would become a better civilization if we all took acid? TR: Oh, absolutely. I think that LSD is the genie in the bottle of the world.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“learned, of course most profoundly of all, that every daisy in every field has an identity just as strong as mine. I mean, when you learn something like that — you don’t just read it, but you learn it and you know it and you feel it in your heart, in your sinews, and in your blood — it can’t help but to change your life.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“Can we talk a little bit about your LSD experience? You described it as being one of the most rewarding days of your life. TR: I’d say not one of but the most rewarding day of my life.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“Actually, with such loud concerts, 20 or 30 years from now, the hearing-aid companies are going to be doing really well financially. If you want to be well off, get into the hearing-aid business.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“I think people who spend a lot of time Googling themselves are people who take themselves way too seriously.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“there are no rules in writing except never to be boring, and even that is subjective.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“like that woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey. She’s no more adept at writing prose than a cat is at swimming, but she’s purring all the way to the bank.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“Obviously, when conditions are sunny and benign, any wimpy wantwit can relax and be cheerful. It’s when her house is burning down that the enlightened person expresses appreciation for her now-unobstructed view of the moon.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“Oh, maybe Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen is my hero. He’s like Zorba the Buddha. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Indian guru who I think was murdered by American government and who later changed his name to Osho, he had this notion of a character called Zorba the Buddha who — we’ll say a man, but it could be a woman too — who was contemplative, led a serene spiritual life, meditated a lot, was a nonviolent, placid person who lived in the spirit but who also knew how to work and make money, knew how to utilize the Internet, knew how much to tip a maître d’ in a Paris nightclub, who was of the world and enjoyed the world and all of its sensual pleasures in terms of food, sex, drink, color, art, but also at the same time was deeply spiritual. And I’ve kind of superimposed that Zorba the Buddha figure onto Leonard Cohen, perhaps unfairly, but he strikes me as someone who is close to that figure. I like the fact that he meditates, that he has spent time alone — a lot of it in anguish in a Buddhist monastery — that he is so adept with language and loves women and wears beautiful Armani suits and will sit and sip wine at a sidewalk café with beautiful girls and yet be able to have this rich inner life, not just creatively but also spiritually.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“You don’t want to suffer to prove that you’re leading an untraditional life. In fact, you don’t need to prove that at all. You just do what is natural.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“By its very nature, a writer’s mind is a monkey mind — and meditation, alas, kills the monkey.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview

“every daisy in every field has an identity just as strong as mine.”
― Mara Altman, Tom Robbins: The Kindle Singles Interview