Tom Robbins Quotes

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

This thing in society that you have to be a stick will always be in my mind, but that's just something I have to deal with.

I've definitely accepted the fact that I'm not normal.

I've never been more normal than I am now.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

You would be better off in exile than priding yourself on be like everyone else.

I think giving yourself permission to be weird is amazing. After all what does it mean to be normal?

Being in the space that I am as a writer, and just as a black dude in America, there's this push to be cool or be what you're expected to be. There's a need for a song that puts that in perspective. I think that's an important thing for young children to hear growing up.

Too often athletes think there's these norms that I have to fit into and there are people that I have to please.

The honest truth is I care so much less about my hair than everyone in America, obviously.

It's easy to think you have to fit some kind of mold.

if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. it's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests he did not create a single leaf the same as another.

Maybe I'm regular and the world needs to adjust?

Why couldn't I be more like other girls my age? Take Mrs. Brown's niece. She spent every waking hour sizing up this beau or that, stitching tea towels and petticoats and putting aside a little each month for a set of Spode Buttercup dishes.

Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.

I believe so many people live what I call that false identity they are living according to other people's expectations, associations, their experiences, the labels in life. And they buy into that.

They yell at me to be dignified. But what are the dignified people like? The people who are held up as examples of me? They are snobs. Frightful snobs I'm a curiosity in Hollywood. I'm a big freak, because I'm myself!

Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.

There is a certain expectation of girls to eventually grow up and behave and fall in line. I've always bucked against that.

Parents need to be more accepting of who their kids are and less concerned about what society thinks they need to be.

I'm not a real crazy social butterfly - and once I realised that and I accepted it, I started to realise how many people weren't accepting of that.

For the more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane.

The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.

I refused to conform to an image that a lot of people thought a president's brother should adopt.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.