Introduction: Well....there I was, as it were, as I be....comfortably at my 'puter on a snowy day in January.....reading the colorful posts of the AFTRLife family. I recall my mind was on lyrical re-run, singing that Traveling Wilburys' song, "Goin' to the End of the Line". You know that one--"Well, it's all right, ridin' around in the breeze. Well, it's all right, if you lead the life you please."

Then, I retrieved my next message. I did a double-take as I didn't recognize the author as a regular newsgroup contributor. Come to find out, it was alert DejaNews reader, Denis T. (not his full name, as we try to protect the innocent here in the AFTRLife). He explained that he had read some of my posts on DejaNews. Also that he had been to a Tom Robbins' lecture in San Francisco in September of 1994. Denis wondered if I would like his TR quotes (like he needed to ask, already!) and being a generous man, also gave his permission to share the quotes with other TR fans! Read on for some of Tom's pearls.....Denis was there, recording with his trusty laptop; and was precisely "TR fan #47" in the autograph/meet-and-greet line. WOW!! Wish I had been there!

After reading through the quotes, I likened Denis' kind gesture to the closing of ARA--

"Pine cones on the Tent.

It's a cold, clear morning; the sun has come over the canyon wall, but you're still dozing around, when something hits the tent. Open the flap and the sun's in your face; the world is ready. Let Amanda be your pine cone."

Denis T....wherever you are right now....thank you for giving me these notes to share with other TR fans! Most of all, thanks for being my pine cone on that January day! ...."Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray. Well it's all right, you still got somethin' to say......remember to live and let live!"

--Debbie Rogers

If you turn a mountain upside down, you get a woman.
If you turn a woman upside down, you get a valley.
If you turn a valley upside down, you get folk music.
If you turn folk music upside down, you get mythology.
If you turn mythology upside down, you get history.
If you turn history upside down, you get religion, journalism, and hysteria.

I usually begin with the title. I write the first sentence. I write the second sentence. People show up. My primary interest is creating a space in which language can happen.

To say that I write only one draft of my work is misleading. I revise as I write. I never leave a sentence until it's as good as I can make it. And I typically go over every sentence 30 to 40 times.

If I fell off a cliff, I would still only travel two miles an hour--two pages a day. I do plan to become computer literate.

Originally, Sissy Henshaw was a man. It took me 75 pages until I realized what was wrong. I sent him to Denmark, and he came back a woman.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues got 200 bad reviews, according to a publicist at New Line Cinema. There's such a purity in that. How could I write a book from the point of a view of a woman? someone wanted to know. Was Bambi written by a deer?

When a book is made into a movie, a lot of people aren't going to be happy because they've already seen the movie in their own heads.

Had I made the movie, I would have filmed it in Hong Kong with Chinese opera singers.

Where I live [Seattle, Washington], it is perfect weather for a writer and a romantic. It reduces temptation.

I am equally at home in honky-tonks and jet-set bars.

I'm on a book tour. You know what a book tour is, don't you? Have you ever seen that movie, "A Man Called Horse"? [later] I'm trying to earn the right to be called Horse.

Many of my readers are 16- and 17-years-old. That's a good sign for me and the universe. Kids today are not the electronic nerds they are made out to be.

Do I still do psychedelics? I take a refresher course every now and then.

LSD is the first tool psychiatry has ever had at its disposal. It's true that acid can cure the common cold. After you've been out of your mind for six or eight hours, you'll forget all about the cold.

All of my female protagonists are strong, spunky, independent women, including Gwendolyn Mati, narrator of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas.

Where do my characters come from? I hold auditions for characters, and she showed up. I was hoping she would change, but she didn't.

I am interested in humor, irony, rebelliousness, spirituality, and eroticism. Those who belong to the Religious Right and those who are Politically Correct lack all five of these humanistic characteristics.

Characters say a lot of things in my novels that I don't agree with. I try to celebrate differences, not be victimized by them. Larry Diamond's view was more cosmic overview of kindness: Everyone in the theater of life is playing their role.

What's funny to me? Pee Wee Herman. I do yoga and meditate, but when I need a real spiritual fix, I smoke a little ganja and watch Pee Wee Herman videos.

James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake has been on my night table for 14 years. It makes for great reading. It's the most realistic novel ever written and is practically unreadable.

Of the six books I've written, only one character was based on an actual person (in Skinny Legs and All). One character just doesn't feel right, one person told me. That was the character.

You can't write to please an audience unless you're a film writer. For a serious writer, there are too many distractions. To write to the taste of the audience is to show them no respect. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas is my most subversive and radical book. I took the most chances and the most risks. The character Q-Jo Huffington? That's just who she was. Problem with politicians is what they say goes in one ear and out the other. My favorite books? Huck Finn. The Horse's Mouth. Lolita. The Ginger Man. Ulysses. I like Garcia-Marquez, Allende, Esquival, all the magical realists. I am reading Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, he out-Joyces Joyce.

Concentration is important to a writer. It's like walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls, very easy to slip and fall.

Still Life with Woodpecker is my favorite of my novels because it was the shortest. And Jitterbug Perfume.

I am an intuitive writer. I write primarily using my intuition. I have had to trust my intuition.

I have always been a writer, at least since I was five years old, when I wrote my first book of stories.

Chicken Soup and Rice and Where the Wild Things Grow are my favorite children's books. And the Pippi Longstocking series she's a real anarchist.

Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and shamanist, is the most brilliant individual I've ever met.

Writing Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas in second person singular was a challenge. It's like the difference between being an orthopedic surgeon and a gynecologist. An orthopedic surgeon wires bones together, but a gynecologist is at the sea of an oyster, mysterious, unfolding.

Los Angeles is the city of dreadful joy. Hell is having a big stiff ego, somebody said. Heaven is having a small, flexible, loose ego. A lot of people in L.A. are living in hell than in anyplace else in the world. I have had five bit parts in movies. Like running away with the circus. Writers lead such solitary lives. The novel is such an autocratic medium.

My spiritual beliefs? I was raised as a southern Baptist, but I was bored at church. I kept waiting to have a religious experience. Then I saw my first Hollywood movie with Natalie Wood! and I knew. Jesus just didn't match up.

Even as a child, I realized that mainstream orthodox Cheez-Whiz religion had missed the boat in a major way no insight, no mystery.

Today, I like a little of this, a little of that, Roquefort, blue cheese, mixed my own fondue: the Sufis, the Gnostics, the Tantra, Zen, Taoism, the Essenes . . . they are not so much religions as they are philosophical systems.

I'm not paranoid, but if the universe is exploding, something must be chasing it.

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You're the person to cough politely in this audience tonight.