Tom Robbins Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Novelists, Fiction

• 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.

  Tom Robbins

  Beach, Morning, Writing

• 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.

  Tom Robbins

  Wall, Writing, Clouds

• Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it.

  Tom Robbins

  Reading, Writing, Good Times

• Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Helping, Compare

• Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Adventure, Journey

• Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Next, Madness

• Don't talk about it - you'll talk it away. Let the ideas flow from your mind to the page without exposing them to air. Especially hot air.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Air, Ideas

• I'm probably more interested in sentences than anything else in life.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Sentences

• Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. The furthest out you can go is the best place to be.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Fool, Best Place

• Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you're in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Bed, Would Be

• People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, People, Imagination

• When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Bottles, Geese

• Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude.

  Tom Robbins

  Art, Writing, People

• 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.'

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Heart, Creating

• I work with pen and paper. That's my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There's something about that process that's so organic.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Ink, Paper

• I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum.

  Tom Robbins

  Mother, Writing, Years

• A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Novel, Ready

• I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Novelists, Neurosis

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates”, p.31, Bantam

• I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

  Tom Robbins

  Book, Writing, Journey

• Most novelists write about twisted lives.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Novelists, Twisted

• I go into a gallery or museum, and I realize that I don't have to formulate any opinions if I don't want to. I don't have to think this thing through and write about it at any great length. I can think about it if I want to; if not, I can just walk out. So I can enjoy painting really a lot more than I could when I had that sort of pressure.

  Tom Robbins

  Writing, Thinking, Museums

  "Oral history interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Martha Kingsbury, www.aaa.si.edu. March 3, 1984.

• Whenever I finish a book, I go off and have some kind of adventure. Having had an adventure in my writing chair or on my writing sofa, an internal adventure, then I need to balance that off with an external adventure, so I'll go tramping through Africa or whitewater rafting or float to Hawaii in a martini shaker or something.

  Tom Robbins

  Book, Adventure, Writing

• My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.

  Tom Robbins

  Wall, Writing, Opposites

• I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.

  Tom Robbins

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  "Oral history interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Martha Kingsbury, www.aaa.si.edu. March 3, 1984.

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