Tom Wolfe quotes

A cult is a religion with no political power. (Tom Wolfe)
Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus ... or off the bus." View quote
Tom Wolfe
If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live. View quote
Tom Wolfe
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me. View quote
Tom Wolfe
No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech. View quote
Tom Wolfe
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes. View quote
Tom Wolfe
The Internet is the modern form of knitting. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it - a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power. (Tom Wolfe)
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe. View quote
Tom Wolfe
At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property. View quote
Tom Wolfe
The demolition derby is, pure and simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times. View quote
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed. View quote
Tom Wolfe
I hate stories in which a person has an occupation and you never see him working at it, like all those marvelous Cary Grant movies where he's a surgeon, and you never see him in the operating room. View quote
Tom Wolfe
I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle. View quote
Tom Wolfe
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. View quote
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. (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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Nonfiction is never going to die. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe