We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that memoirists might be limited by their own creativity, relying on real experiences rather than fictionalizing them.
Tom Robbins' quote humorously critiques the genre of memoirs, implying that those who choose to write about their own lives do so not out of a desire to share unique stories, but rather because they may not possess the imaginative capacity to create entirely fictional narratives. It reflects on the nature of storytelling and the blend between reality and creativity, questioning the depth of one's imaginative skills if they resort to recounting true events.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a literary festival, this quote can spark a discussion on the authenticity of memoir writing.
More from Tom Robbins
All quotes βThere are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.
I'm an outlaw, not a philosopher, but I know this much: there's meaning in everything, all things are connected, and a good champagne is a drink.' Bernard began to sing again. Timidly, Leigh-Cheri joined in. Between verses, they opened another bottle. The popping of its cork echoed throughout the great stone chamber. Of the three billion people on earth, only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri heard the popping of the cork and its echoes. Only Bernard and Leigh-Cheri passed out under the tablecloth.
The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions - anger, jealousy, etc - to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.
On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.
Similar quotes
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
Literature transcends national boundaries, racial boundaries. It goes deep into the issues that concern all human beings. That is why, when people read Greek tragedy - it doesn't matter who reads it - they are still moved by it.
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.