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" 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. "

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" 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

" Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. "

" 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. "

" Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. "

" 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

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

" 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 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. "

" Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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

" Nonfiction is never going to die. "

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

" 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 never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle. "

" 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