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" 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! "

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" 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

Men

Myself

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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.' "

" 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. "

" There is no motivation higher than being a good writer. "

" 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. "

" 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

" The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. "

" A cult is a religion with no political power. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I have discovered that for me - now, maybe it doesn't work for everybody - for me, it is much more effective to arrive at any situation as a man from Mars than to try to fit in. "

Tom Wolfe

Now

Man

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first!... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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