Motivational Tom Wolfe Quotes:– Tom Wolfe was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques.
Inspirational Tom Wolfe Quotes
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
Tom Wolfe
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
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
Tom Wolfe
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
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
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
This is the artist, then, life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.
Tom Wolfe
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
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
We are now in the Me Decade – seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
Tom Wolfe
Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.
Tom Wolfe
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart, it is part of Society and its traditions.
Tom Wolfe
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
Tom Wolfe
Nonfiction is never going to die.
Tom Wolfe
I don’t think journalists should talk about whom they’re voting for.
Tom Wolfe
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
I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that was so bad that, although I’m a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
Tom Wolfe
In my entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
Tom Wolfe
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
Television reporters aren’t really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that’s really all they are.
Tom Wolfe
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of New Journalism.
Tom Wolfe
Most people don’t read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.
Tom Wolfe
That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately, you are dealing with words that can have meaning.
Tom Wolfe
There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ and ‘Collier’s’ both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now, of course, information technology… the new way of killing time.
Tom Wolfe
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
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
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.
Tom Wolfe
I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect… of a skipped beat. It seemed to be the mind reacted – first!… in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.
Tom Wolfe
Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
Tom Wolfe
The ‘New York Honk,’ as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile… and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.
Tom Wolfe
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
I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn’t have a 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.’
Tom Wolfe
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.
Tom Wolfe
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
Tom Wolfe
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 society.
Tom Wolfe
So many people in this country have 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.
Tom Wolfe
The 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 plowing ahead.
Tom Wolfe
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
‘Back to Blood’ really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except for the gym.
Tom Wolfe
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
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
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
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.
Tom Wolfe
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.
Tom Wolfe
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.
Tom Wolfe
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
Tom Wolfe
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.
Tom Wolfe
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
‘Why’ is a question no animal can ask because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug?
Tom Wolfe
I can remember that on the shelves at home, there were these books by Thomas Wolfe. ‘Look Homeward Angel’ and ‘Of Time and the River.’ ‘Of Time and the River’ had just come out when I was aware of his name. My parents had a hard time convincing me that he was no kin whatsoever. My attitude was, ‘Well, what’s he doing on the shelf, then?’
Tom Wolfe
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
I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.
Tom Wolfe
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
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
I’m a great believer in outlines.
Tom Wolfe
I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. This 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
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.
Tom Wolfe
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.
Tom Wolfe
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
