Top 100 Tom Wolfe Quotes
#1. A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.
Tom Wolfe
#3. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
Tom Wolfe
#4. The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself - Now - and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out the moment, back to the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve
Tom Wolfe
#5. YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tom Wolfe
#6. This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
Tom Wolfe
#7. I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.
Tom Wolfe
#8. I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.
Tom Wolfe
#9. There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.
Tom Wolfe
#10. The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.
Tom Wolfe
#11. One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
Tom Wolfe
#12. At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.
Tom Wolfe
#13. I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
Tom Wolfe
#14. often in The Descent of Man, "my dog" steps forth as major evidence.
Tom Wolfe
#15. Then he put that one down behind a framed sepia-tone picture of a baseball player named Cecil Travis and picked up another one and tilted it back to his lips.
Tom Wolfe
#16. By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.
Tom Wolfe
#17. Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.
Tom Wolfe
#19. That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.
Tom Wolfe
#20. Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.
Tom Wolfe
#21. Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.
Tom Wolfe
#22. What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature ... That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.
Tom Wolfe
#23. feet - "Charlotte." Someone inside was using her
Tom Wolfe
#24. You don't understand my dis-mounting. It's like climbing a mountain. Would you rather climb the mountain or have a helicopter deposit you on the top? The continual climb, the continual remounting, makes it a richer experience, and so on.
Tom Wolfe
#25. Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casual shit spelled money.
Tom Wolfe
#26. Can't nobody make us do a thang once we git hard against it. And if anybody don't like that, you don't have to explain a thang to'm. All you got to say is, 'I'm Charlotte Simmons, and I don't hold with thangs like 'at.' And they'll respect you for that.
Tom Wolfe
#27. If you label it this, then it can't be that.
Tom Wolfe
#28. If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
Tom Wolfe
#29. I hate stories in which a person has an occupation and you never see him working at it, like all those marvelous Cary Grant movies where he's a surgeon, and you never see him in the operating room.
Tom Wolfe
#30. If you become indignant, this elevates you to the plane of intellectual.
Tom Wolfe
#31. It is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon.
Tom Wolfe
#32. It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.
Tom Wolfe
#33. Your self ... is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.
Tom Wolfe
#34. I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.
Tom Wolfe
#35. When I went to high school, my most passionate desire was to be a professional baseball player. But something within me told me that was not going to happen.
Tom Wolfe
#36. It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
Tom Wolfe
#37. To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
Tom Wolfe
#39. Nonfiction is never going to die.
Tom Wolfe
#40. We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
Tom Wolfe
#41. I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'
Tom Wolfe
#42. I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Tom Wolfe
#43. he published a manifesto with a title Darwinists have been quoting ever since: "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."78
Tom Wolfe
#44. I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect ... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first! ... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.
Tom Wolfe
#45. Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
Tom Wolfe
#46. In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.
Tom Wolfe
#47. The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's.
Tom Wolfe
#48. Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.
Tom Wolfe
#49. The road of knowledge leads to the palace of wisdom
Tom Wolfe
#50. Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
Tom Wolfe
#51. The press in New York has tended to favor New Society in every period, and to take it seriously, if only because it provides news.
Tom Wolfe
#52. I'm a great believer in outlines.
Tom Wolfe
#53. Nerds ... the 'nerd' has never been precisely defined, thanks to the psychological complexity of the creature. The word has connotations of some level of intelligence. The typical nerd is a male with intelligence but no sense of giving it a manly face.
Tom Wolfe
#54. Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.
Tom Wolfe
#55. I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course.
Tom Wolfe
#56. Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.
Tom Wolfe
#57. The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
Tom Wolfe
#58. And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.
Tom Wolfe
#59. Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
Tom Wolfe
#60. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.
Tom Wolfe
#61. God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
Tom Wolfe
#62. America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down!
Tom Wolfe
#63. They were ... well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.
Tom Wolfe
#64. You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.
Tom Wolfe
#65. How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements ... How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles.
Tom Wolfe
#66. The first person to refer to Darwin's tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61
Tom Wolfe
#67. Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So, qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve - of how fast a man is willing to take a curve.
Tom Wolfe
#68. To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don't know about.
Tom Wolfe
#69. Beautiful people blossomed forth from out of the polyglot, people who really had a lot to them, only it had been smothered by all the eternal social games that had been set up. Suddenly they found each other.
Tom Wolfe
#70. And now, in the season of the Radical Chic, the Black Panthers.
Tom Wolfe
#71. The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.
Tom Wolfe
#72. 'Back to Blood' really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except to the gym.
Tom Wolfe
#73. Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
Tom Wolfe
#74. By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
Tom Wolfe
#75. A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
Tom Wolfe
#76. I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
Tom Wolfe
#77. 'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug?
Tom Wolfe
#78. I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that.
Tom Wolfe
#79. It got to be an American custom, like talk shows, Face the Nation, marriage counseling, marathon encounters, or zoning hearings.
Tom Wolfe
#80. Fortunately, the world is full of people with information compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don't know. They're some of the greatest allies that any writer has.
Tom Wolfe
#81. You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.
Tom Wolfe
#82. She was wearing a skirt and a big-shouldered jacket of a royal blue that was fashionable in France, a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse, and electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes.
Tom Wolfe
#83. My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
Tom Wolfe
#84. There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.
Tom Wolfe
#85. On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe.
Tom Wolfe
#86. In this little room full of people he was suffering the pangs of men whose egos lose their virginity - as happens when they overhear for the first time a beautiful woman's undiluted, full-strength opinion of their masculine selves.
Tom Wolfe
#87. They were Archer's second set of children an d paragons of contemporary teenage cynicism. They enjoyed setting fire to the tails of tender thoughts.
Tom Wolfe
#88. I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one.
Tom Wolfe
#89. The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.
Tom Wolfe
#90. His genius had only begun to flower. This was only journalism, after all, a cup of tea on the way to his eventual triumph as a novelist.
Tom Wolfe
#91. Put your good where it will do the most!
Tom Wolfe
#92. The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
Tom Wolfe
#93. Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society.
Tom Wolfe
#94. I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound.
Tom Wolfe
#95. They're just beginning to open the doors in their minds"
"But once you've been through that door, you can't just keep going through it over and over again ...
Tom Wolfe
#96. In the 1920s and 1930s they hit upon the bright idea of co-opting genetics and treating it as one of the Theory of Evolution's components. A
Tom Wolfe
#97. I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me.
Tom Wolfe
#98. The Yanks always wore neckties that leapt out in front of their shirts, as if to announce the awkwardness to follow.
Tom Wolfe
#99. Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
Tom Wolfe
#100. If a monkey has become a man - what may not a man become?
Tom Wolfe
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