Tom Wolfe Quotes

A cult is a religion with no political power.

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later.

You're either on the bus or off the bus.

Put your good where it will do the most!

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I'm a great believer in outlines.

(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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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!

Nonfiction is never going to die.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.