Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society. "

Tom Wolfe

Think

Society

Own

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves. "

" I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

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

" 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. "

" The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity. "