We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Tom Robbins
Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.
There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
The ultimate end of any ideology is totalitarianism.
True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.
The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.
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.
The sky was the color of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas.
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe.
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.
The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.
Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.
The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.
Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.
I've decided to take advantage of outsourcing. My next novel will be written by a couple of guys in Bangalore, India.
Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
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.
I eat so much mayonnaise they were going to send me to the Mayo Clinic.
Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.
What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.
Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle - even though it cannot be solved - is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine.
If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.
In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.
The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who've been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.
Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.
To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.
I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.
In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.
I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know.
Education is for growth and fulfillment.
When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.
If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.
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.'
Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego.
The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don't do a lot of reading anymore except on tape.
The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.
We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth.
Writing is the hardest physical work there is.
I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.
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?'
My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.
