Tom Wolfe quotes - page 3

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)
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. View quote
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! View quote
Tom Wolfe
I'm a great believer in outlines. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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
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 read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. View quote
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness. View quote
Tom Wolfe
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. View quote
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 me the mind reacted - first!... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around. View quote
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
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. (Tom Wolfe)
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak. View quote
Tom Wolfe
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe. View quote
Tom Wolfe