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The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'

Tom Robbins

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

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Each time we exhale, the world ends when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal. It all transpires inside of us. In our consciousness, in our hearts. All the time.
Tom Robbins
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There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.
Tom Robbins
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The goal of this generation's pioneers should be to restrict procreation and limit consumption. They should also take every opportunity to make themselves happy, realizing that the key to self-generated happiness (the only reliable kind) is the refusal to take oneself too seriously.
Tom Robbins
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I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.
Tom Robbins
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We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.
Tom Robbins
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Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love.
Tom Robbins
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But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.
Tom Robbins
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Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.
Tom Robbins
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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
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When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.
Tom Robbins
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I believed in looking at people as individuals, not in groups. I hated groups still do. And I saw particularly the university, the university artists really acted as a group. The others didn't so much, but the university people took advantage of that and behaved like a group, rather than as individuals. They had a lot of power that way.
Tom Robbins
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The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure)
Tom Robbins
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The scientist keeps the romantic honest, and the romantic keeps the scientist human.
Tom Robbins
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…he glanced over his shoulder at her, regarding her, as he often did before they made love, as if she were a lost continent about to be rediscovered.
Tom Robbins
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A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the 'mind of wonder.' There is not a lot of 'mind of wonder' writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that's what appeals to the readers who are my fans.
Tom Robbins
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I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Tom Robbins
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There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a discovery.
Tom Robbins
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A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.
Tom Robbins
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And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
Tom Robbins
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Jackson Pollock said once, I don't really feel that many people in this world are alive. He said, That's why I like you, Tom. You're alive.
Tom Robbins