Tom Wolfe famous quotes

A cult is a religion with no political power.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Religious #Philosophy #Power

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

#Imagination #Giving #Bigger

Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.
-- Tom Wolfe

#People #Mad #Acting

A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Lying #Fool #May

You're either on the bus or off the bus.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Hippie #Bus

Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Apologizing

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe
-- Tom Wolfe

#Children #Father #Boys

don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Doors #Emotion #Sometimes

Put your good where it will do the most!
-- Tom Wolfe

(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

#Writing #Feelings #Matter

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Writing #Fiction #Problem

Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Care #Sometimes #Realizing

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Love #Expression #Ultimate

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Believe #Important #Half

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Conservative

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

#Leadership #Believe #Mad

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Life #Loneliness #Being Alone

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

#Years #Numbers #Pieces

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Painting #Theory #These Days

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Heart #Style #Tradition

I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Thinking #Voting #Should

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

#Waiting #Forgiving #Never Forget

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

#Business #Wall #Three

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

#Waiting #Firsts #Looks

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

#Thinking #Greek #Age

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

#Forever #Stories #Kind

Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Voice #Target #Parody

You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.
-- Tom Wolfe

#People #Heaven

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Years #America #People

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

#Time #Age #Renaissance

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

#Running #Country #Mean

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

#People #World #Determined

Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Mind #Becoming #Groups

I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!... I'm Me!... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought... ego... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game...
-- Tom Wolfe

#Girl #War #Games

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

#Forever #Horizon #Glimpse

a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it... in this moment... this supreme moment... this Kairos.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Past #Doors #Feelings

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

#Beautiful #Games #Giving

The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned.
-- Tom Wolfe

#World #Divine #Mass

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

#Beautiful #Mother #Writing

If you label it this, then it can't be that.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Labels

[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Men #Knowing #Perception

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

#Baby #Mean #Doors

Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Television

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

#Simple #Men #Curves

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

#Real #World #Disease

Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Book #Long #Firsts

Nonfiction is never going to die.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Nonfiction

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Careers #People #Nonfiction

Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Thinking #People #Pages

Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Melting Pot #Miami #Stones

I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Empires #Mets #Wanted

I'm a great believer in outlines.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Believer

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

#People #Joy #Quality

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

#Light #Two #Long

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

#Animal #Important #Battle

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

#Goal #Way #Vietnam

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology...the new way of killing time.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Technology #Issues #People

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Art #Romantic Love #Games

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

#Two #Massachusetts #Asking

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

#Attitude #Hippie #Example

The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.
-- Tom Wolfe

#New York #Spring #Mouths

So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year... a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade - many other countries. So they really don't forget.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Loyalty #Country #Years

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

#Thinking #People #Complaining

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Brain #Machines #Speech

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Father #Thinking #Editors

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
-- Tom Wolfe

#Lonely #Loneliness #Being Alone