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" 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. "

Tom Wolfe

Writing

Newspaper

You

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" Nonfiction is never going to die. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" '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

" Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me. "

Tom Wolfe

Career

People

" I'm a great believer in outlines. "

" Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around. "

" I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound. "

" So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year... a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade - many other countries. So they really don't forget. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. "

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