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"Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"
"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."
"My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep."
"Creativity is the residue of time wasted."
"I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity-damn posterity."
"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"
"When you aren't satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn't need to complain."
Explore more quotes by Tom Robbins
"In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance - and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done."
"Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play--more than piety, more than charity or vigilance--was what allowed human beings to transcend evil."
"There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better."
"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 clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown--laughed at, persecuted and despised--playing out the dumb show at his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority."
"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."
"Now tequila may be the favored beverage of outlaws but that doesn't mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!"
"There was no burger so soggy that he would not eat it. No tequila so mean that he would not drink it. No car so covered with birdshit and rust that he would not drive it around town (and if it were a convertible, he'd have the top down, even in rain, even in snow). There was no flag he would not desecrate, no true believer he would not mock, no song he wouldn't sign off-key, no dental appointment he wouldn't break, no child he wouldn't do tricks for, no old person he wouldn't help in from the cold, no moon he wouldn't lie under..."
"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."
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