I was tidying up one of my bookshelves today, and picked up one of my all-time favourite books - 'Jitterbug Perfume' by Tom Robbins.

Spending the next hour, reading the first part again, I was reminded of the time I met him in Sydney, when he was promoting his new book (at that time) - 'Frogs Pajamas'.

Meeting this great author was one of the thrills of my life, especially because he read the entire first chapter of Jitterbug Perfume for us. Hearing a writer read their own work certainly makes a huge difference.

Here are some quotes from the book, from a man who's mind is so fluid and and inventive it never fails to amaze me....

"The secondary function of a bathroom mirror is to measure murmurs in mental mud."

"Modern Romans insisted that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic.

If you didn't serve the nasty fellow (God), the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down."

"In the quiet ache of the evening, Alobar listened to his calluses grow."

"I journey to the east, where I have been told there are men who have taught death some manners."

"You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House."

"Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing."

"Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand."

"She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang."

"... overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between a German opera and a hockey game."

"Some of the professors and physicians were rather shabby; they were men too clothed in ideas to pay much attention to grooming."

"The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever."

"...the natural process of aging, which according to Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy, is so unnaturally cruel that only man could have ordained it - neither nature nor God would stoop so low."

"My lunar sign is in Virgo. Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf I turn into an accountant."

"Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich."

"There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition."

"I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I'm not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affaction."

"Dr. Wolfgang Morgenstern was propably one of those loud Jewish boys who got paid for telling dirty jokes in public."

"Water! Of all liquids on Earth, the only one chosen for scrubbin' and flushin'. The liquid they rinse baby's nappies in, the fluid that floods the gutters o' this cloud-squeezer town; a single drop o' water discolors a glass of Irish, and you, false friend, are wantin' me to pour this abrasive substance into me defenseless body!"

"Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult."

"A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised."

"A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus."

"Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon."

"They were old enough to know better. Some of them were old enough to remember when old Macdonald had a farm."

"To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought."

that's why you disapeared from forum ..... ammm....

One of my all time fav books and a must read.

Should be a compulsory read for all the thai pollies but I guess they already indulged in their own sense of Robbins humour ona daily basis!

Lucky you for meeting him in person. Cheers for the quotes.