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John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

Tom Robbins

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Tom Robbins
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: July 22
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Blowing Rock
North Carolina
Thomas Eugene Robbins
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More quotes by Tom Robbins

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Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool.
Tom Robbins
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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.
Tom Robbins
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We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.
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We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
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It's entirely possible to function as a free-thinking individual without succumbing to narcissism. This can be tricky at times, I suppose, but then so can the tango - particularly if you're dancing alone.
Tom Robbins
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Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going.
Tom Robbins
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You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.
Tom Robbins
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Though February lay about her shoulders like a cloak of lead.
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The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.
Tom Robbins
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Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.
Tom Robbins
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The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Tom Robbins
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'Neotenty' is 'remaining young,' and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it.
Tom Robbins
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One tended to lose one’s bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.
Tom Robbins
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Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.'
Tom Robbins
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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
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A person's looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we've been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That's the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.
Tom Robbins
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Human beings were not well served by permanence or stasis. Obviously, if individuals were progressing, they were undergoing a series of presumably desirable alterations, but in a universe where flux is fundamental, it can be argued that even change for the worse is preferable to no change at all. Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?.
Tom Robbins
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I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.
Tom Robbins
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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
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A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.
Tom Robbins