Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around. "
Tom Wolfe
Pot
Miami
Melt
" 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
" 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
" Everyone is taught the essentials of writing for at least 13 years, maybe more if they go to college. Nobody is taught music or tap dancing that way. "
Tom Wolfe
Music
Nobody
Dancing
" 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
" We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past. "
Tom Wolfe
Acting
Only
Past
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Become
Worry
Truth
" That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning. "
Tom Wolfe
Words
Time
Meaning
" 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
" By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I. "
Tom Wolfe
War
End
World
" Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting. "
Tom Wolfe
Theory
Without
See
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for. "
Tom Wolfe
About
Whom
Voting
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Live
Time
Attitude
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe. "
Tom Wolfe
Three
Street
Universe
" 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
" A cult is a religion with no political power. "
Tom Wolfe
Religion
Power
Cult
" 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
" God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism. "
Tom Wolfe
God
New
Kind
" 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. "
Tom Wolfe
Think
Complain
People
" 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
" You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes. "
Tom Wolfe
You
Your
Background
" 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