Tom Robbins Quotes

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

I don't just act to pay my rent. I really like doing it, so I get frustrated when I don't get to do it all the time, so short films are a really great way to be doing it and working with your friends, working on smaller, more specific things without limiting yourself in other ways.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

I'm going to continue writing. I'll always be a storyteller. But I'm also taking time to enjoy my life.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

I tried to write a TV series, and then I discovered first of all that I love writing more than anything on this earth, and that you could write exactly as well as you want to.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.