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" 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

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" I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. "

" 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

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

" The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious. "

Tom Wolfe

Power

American

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm a great believer in outlines. "

" 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. "

" Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public. "

" 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. "

" '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

Gym

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" Nonfiction is never going to die. "