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" 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
Related Quotes:
" There is no motivation higher than being a good writer. "
Tom Wolfe
Higher
Writer
Than
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Animal
I Am
Power
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Modern
History
Art
" 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
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Beat
Creating
End
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Letters
Two
Three
" If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are. "
Tom Wolfe
Honest
Want
Difference
" '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
" I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it. "
Tom Wolfe
Wait
Who
First
" 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
" A cult is a religion with no political power. "
Tom Wolfe
Religion
Power
Cult
" 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
" In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific. "
Tom Wolfe
Out
Nature
People
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
You
Imagination
Doing
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Art
Game
Long
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Time
Technology
Saturday
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Age
Think
Evolution
" 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
" 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
" There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone. "
Tom Wolfe
Destiny
Child
Time
" I'm a great believer in outlines. "
Tom Wolfe
Great
Outlines
Believer
" 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
" 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
" Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around. "
Tom Wolfe
Pot
Miami
Melt
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Own
Year
My Own
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Small
Artist
Art
" 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