Tom Robbins Quotes

It never ceases to amaze me that readers who are willing to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the motivation of a vicious serial killer get high and mighty because I have put a coffee shop where there isn't one. Er... it's a novel. I made one up. I'm allowed to make stuff up. I'd go as far as to suggest that I make stuff up for a living.

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.

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

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

The wonderful thing about writing fiction is that no one is stopping you. There's no one saying, 'You can't do that.'

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.

I love writing, but I have that E. E. Cummings idea that as long as you stay inside the rules of your own world, it doesn't matter what it is.

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

There's no reason why a writer shouldn't explore and use different genres.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.

I suppose I'm pulled towards fiction because I really like the freedom it gives me.

Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."