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" Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting. "
Tom Wolfe
Theory
Without
See
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" I can remember that on the shelves at home, there were these books by Thomas Wolfe. 'Look Homeward Angel' and 'Of Time and the River.' 'Of Time and the River' had just come out when I was aware of his name. My parents had a hard time convincing me that he was no kin whatsoever. My attitude was, 'Well, what's he doing on the shelf, then?' "
Tom Wolfe
Attitude
Parents
Time
" '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
Blood
Me
Gym
" 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
Writing
Newspaper
You
" 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
Thought
Age
Father
" 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
You
World
Know
" Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice. "
Tom Wolfe
Target
Voice
Start
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Good
Time
Say
" 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
Surgeon
See
Person
" 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
Understanding
History
Life
" My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me. "
Tom Wolfe
Me
Career
People
" 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
You
Discovery
Know
" 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
Baseball
School
Me
" American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting; you have the people on the right. But the train's on track. They just keep ploughing ahead. "
Tom Wolfe
People
Government
American
" 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
Never Forget
Forget
Easy
" 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
Face
Thanks
Intelligence
" My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. "
Tom Wolfe
People
Lie
Kind
" 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
Believe
Way
Problem
" A cult is a religion with no political power. "
Tom Wolfe
Religion
Power
Cult
" 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
Internet
Strength
You
" We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history. "
Tom Wolfe
History
Me
Now
" 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
Words
Looking
Time
" 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
Communication
Joy
Quality
" 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
Way
Pretty
Stop
" 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
Satire
Push
Me
" 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
Love
Joy
Great
" 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
Women
Look
Writing
" If I had my choice, I would be writing by typewriter. I worked on newspapers for 10 years. I typed with the touch system, and unfortunately, you can't keep typewriters going today. You have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked. You have to - it's a horrible search to try to find missing parts. So I went to the computer. "
Tom Wolfe
Today
Choice
Search
" 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
Driving
Simple
Racing
" '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
Ask
Question
Speech
" 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
Country
Year
Loyalty