Top 100 Tom Wolfe Quotes
#1. When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.
Daniel Kehlmann
#2. I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.
Meghan Daum
#3. Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.'
Peter York
#4. David Blum burned a lot of bridges. He burned people early in their careers. He took on the wrong people, though. He's not Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe, he's David Blum living in a cheap flat.
Rob Lowe
#5. Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.
Edward Abbey
#6. It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe's 'saturation reporting' was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.
David Cronenberg
#7. I come from that earlier time in America when palm pilot was a nickname you recieved upon entering puberty! I was more than a palm pilot I was the palm Chuck Jager. Tom Wolfe wrote a book about me called The Right Hand Stuff. I was the only guy in my class hip enough to move to the European grip.
Dennis Miller
#8. I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.
Peter York
#9. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don't like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper.
Chang-rae Lee
#10. There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York.
(on Tom Wolfe)
Norman Mailer
#11. Writers vary tremendously. Was it Tom Wolfe who stood up or was it [Ernest] Hemingway who had to stand up? I don't know.
Rod Serling
#12. I think it may have been Tom Wolfe (if it wasn't, my apologies, Tom, and my apologies to whoever it was) who said in print once, 'David Carradine lives the life that Hunter Thompson only writes about.'
David Carradine
#13. I hadn't read or heard a lot about [Tom] Wolfe until I read this script, and in that way I think it was really clever to write a piece about him instead of Max Perkins,[Ernest] Hemingway, [John] Fitzgerald, or others that people have strong opinions of already.
Jude Law
#14. Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
William Zinsser
#15. You don't need Tom Wolfe to tell you that the Buckhead section of Atlanta is the jewel of the city, an area of gracious homes, elegant hotels and shopping centers, as well as some of the best restaurants.
Florence Fabricant
#16. It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine.
(on Tom Wolfe)
John Irving
#17. [Tom] Wolfe's books offered a whole new world to step into, and whilst at times you could accuse him of being somewhat long-winded, he had an incredible quality of prose and a bravery of writing from the heart. He believed in being autobiographical at all times.
Jude Law
#18. A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.
Tom Wolfe
#19. We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
Tom Wolfe
#20. It helps to know from a very early age what you want to do. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer, even though I couldn't even read. It was mainly because I thought of my father as a writer.
Tom Wolfe
#22. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
Tom Wolfe
#23. 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
#24. YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tom Wolfe
#25. This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
Tom Wolfe
#26. 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
#27. The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.
Tom Wolfe
#28. I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.
Tom Wolfe
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
Tom Wolfe
#33. Everyone is taught the essentials of writing for at least 13 years, maybe more if they go to college. Nobody is taught music or tap dancing that way.
Tom Wolfe
#34. I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.
Tom Wolfe
#35. In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public.
Tom Wolfe
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. often in The Descent of Man, "my dog" steps forth as major evidence.
Tom Wolfe
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.
Tom Wolfe
#43. The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the first World War.
Tom Wolfe
#44. We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening.
Tom Wolfe
#45. That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.
Tom Wolfe
#46. Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.
Tom Wolfe
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. feet - "Charlotte." Someone inside was using her
Tom Wolfe
#50. 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
#51. Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casual shit spelled money.
Tom Wolfe
#52. It was a chorus! A rain of garbage! A Rigoletto from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx!
Tom Wolfe
#53. 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
#54. If you label it this, then it can't be that.
Tom Wolfe
#55. Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
Tom Wolfe
#56. If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
Tom Wolfe
#57. 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
#58. People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another.
Tom Wolfe
#59. If you become indignant, this elevates you to the plane of intellectual.
Tom Wolfe
#60. 'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.
Tom Wolfe
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman.
Tom Wolfe
#64. Your self ... is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.
Tom Wolfe
#65. I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.
Tom Wolfe
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#70. Nonfiction is never going to die.
Tom Wolfe
#71. 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
#72. I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it!
Tom Wolfe
#73. 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
#74. I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
Tom Wolfe
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
Tom Wolfe
#78. 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
#79. To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo's David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.
Tom Wolfe
#80. Dear Mother,
I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried ... I have met some Beautiful People and ...
Tom Wolfe
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. The road of knowledge leads to the palace of wisdom
Tom Wolfe
#84. Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
Tom Wolfe
#85. It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.
Tom Wolfe
#86. 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
#87. I'm a great believer in outlines.
Tom Wolfe
#88. Everything in everybody's life is ... significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings.
Tom Wolfe
#89. (W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.
Tom Wolfe
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. A few joints are circulating around, saliva-liva-liva-liva-liva.
Tom Wolfe
#94. Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.
Tom Wolfe
#95. It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go.
Tom Wolfe
#96. A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman.
Tom Wolfe
#97. The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
Tom Wolfe
#98. 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
#99. If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.
Tom Wolfe
#100. It's great to be a part of the greatest jackoff in history.
Tom Wolfe
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