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Tom Wolfe Quotes



Quotes by Tom Wolfe - (54 quotes)

Tom Wolfe - From the Aging category:

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Aging category:

To a man of sixty... one of the grimmest reminders of the Reaper's approach comes when his doctors, the people who have attended to his body for decades, begin retiring on him... or dying on him... or both. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Ambition category:

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Architecture category:

Stone was the most prominent architect in America, and he decided that the modernist movement in architecture - in other words, the parade of glass boxes that marched across America - had become exhausted, not worth pursuing anymore. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Artists category:

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Authority category:

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)

Tom Wolfe - From the Contemporary Art category:

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Culture category:

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Culture category:

You can lead a person to culture, but you can't make them think. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Ego category:

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Emotion category:

- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...
Don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Experience category:

You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Fashion category:

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions - Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Fire category:

The bonfire of the vanities. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Gender category:

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)

Tom Wolfe - From the Goodness category:

- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...
Put your good where it will do the most! (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Health category:

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Individuality category:

Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Inspiration category:

What I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Journey category:

You can't go home again. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Life category:

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you? (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Loneliness category:

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. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Love category:

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Love category:

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

Tom Wolfe - From the Modernism category:

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)

Tom Wolfe - From the Money category:

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)

Tom Wolfe - From the Morality category:

You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Originality category:

...worked so far out beyond the frontiers of conventional studio art that they have no names themselves for the forms they create. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Perception category:

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Performance category:

Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don't know that is what they're trapped by, their little script. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Planning category:

I'm a great believer in outlines. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Politics category:

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Profession category:

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. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Quality category:

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)

Tom Wolfe - From the Questions category:

What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse? (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Recognition category:

Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Religion category:

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)

Tom Wolfe - From the Seeing category:

Not 'Seeing is Believing' you ninny, but 'Believing is Seeing.' For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Selling category:

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Sleep category:

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Subject category:

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

Tom Wolfe - From the Subject category:

Nonfiction is never going to die. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Success category:

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Symbols category:

Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Talent category:

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Technology category:

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

Tom Wolfe - From the Time category:

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)

Tom Wolfe - From the Titles category:

If you label it this, then it can't be that. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Truth category:

-The Bonfire of the Vanities...
Bullshit reigns. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Unknowns category:

- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...
It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Vanity category:

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Winning category:

Fields are won by those who believe in the winning. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Writing category:

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book, and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it. (Tom Wolfe)

Tom Wolfe - From the Writing category:

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)