Tom Wolfe quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Tom Wolfe on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

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

Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman.

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

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

If a monkey has become a man - what may not a man become?

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

feet - "Charlotte." Someone inside was using her

If you become indignant, this elevates you to the plane of intellectual.

often in The Descent of Man, "my dog" steps forth as major evidence.

Art is not eternal.

The road of knowledge leads to the palace of wisdom

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

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

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.

A few joints are circulating around, saliva-liva-liva-liva-liva.

Nonfiction is never going to die.

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.

Bullshit reigns.

It was a chorus! A rain of garbage! A Rigoletto from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx!

I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.

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

The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the first World War.

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

'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.

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

It's great to be a part of the greatest jackoff in history.

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

Art is a creed, not a craft.

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

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

It got to be an American custom, like talk shows, Face the Nation, marriage counseling, marathon encounters, or zoning hearings.

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

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

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

If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

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.

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

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.

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.

You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.

Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casual shit spelled money.

'Back to Blood' really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except to the gym.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Put your good where it will do the most!

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

I'm a great believer in outlines.

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

And now, in the season of the Radical Chic, the Black Panthers.

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

That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.

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

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

'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug?

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.

Everything in everybody's life is ... significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings.

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

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

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

The Yanks always wore neckties that leapt out in front of their shirts, as if to announce the awkwardness to follow.

On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe.

Your self ... is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.

Dear Mother,
I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried ... I have met some Beautiful People and ...

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.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.