Quote

When we accept bad art because it's good politics, we're killing the swan to feed the chickens.

Tom Robbins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tom Robbins
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: July 22
Author
Autobiographer
Biographer
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Blowing Rock
North Carolina
Thomas Eugene Robbins
Killing
Accept
Accepting
Politics
Art
Swan
Good
Swans
Chickens
Feed

More quotes by Tom Robbins

Image
Don't talk about it - you'll talk it away. Let the ideas flow from your mind to the page without exposing them to air. Especially hot air.
Tom Robbins
Image
…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
Image
Hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find out you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means. Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.
Tom Robbins
Image
The odor of frying bacon, sausage links, and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. She hated the sensation. It reminded her of pregnancy. Every Sunday morning, Leigh-Cheri awoke to a pan of fried fear.
Tom Robbins
Image
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
Image
Madame Lily Devalier always asked Where are you? in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.
Tom Robbins
Image
The most important thing in life is style. That is, the style of ones existence-the characteristic mode of ones actions-is basically, ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing, then style is doubly definitive, because style describes the doing.
Tom Robbins
Image
My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.
Tom Robbins
Image
Rules such as Write what you know, and Show, don't tell, while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.
Tom Robbins
Image
The pervasive brutality in current fiction - the death, disease, dysfunction, depression, dismemberment, drug addiction, dementia, and dreary little dramas of domestic discord - is an obvious example of how language in exploitative, cynical or simply neurotic hands can add to the weariness, the darkness in the world.
Tom Robbins
Image
Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.
Tom Robbins
Image
Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
Tom Robbins
Image
He was becoming unstuck, he was sure of that - his bones were no longer wrapped in flesh but in clouds of dust, in hummingbirds, dragonflies, and luminous moths - but so perfect was his equilibrium that he felt no fear. He was vast, he was many, he was dynamic, he was eternal.
Tom Robbins
Image
There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.
Tom Robbins
Image
One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires.
Tom Robbins
Image
America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous?
Tom Robbins
Image
Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark
Tom Robbins
Image
There're many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they're victims.
Tom Robbins
Image
Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
Tom Robbins
Image
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
Tom Robbins