Tom Wolfe Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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

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.

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
... like fishing for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime arcade.

Tom Wolfe
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

Tom Wolfe
It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.

Tom Wolfe
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
We are now in the Me Decade—seeing the upward roll of…the third great religious wave in American history…and this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes…Me…Me…Me…Me.

Tom Wolfe
A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power.

Tom Wolfe
I use a typewriter. My wife gave me a word processor two Christmases ago that still stares at me accusingly from a desk in my office. One day I am going to be compelled to learn how to use it.

Tom Wolfe
The demolition derby is, pure and simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times.

Tom Wolfe
It is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon.

Tom Wolfe
You can dramatize reality in fiction so easily and with such economy, bring so many strands of a society onto one plotline. You can have a real impact with fiction provided that you deal with reality, provided you want to show how society works, how it fits together.

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.

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

Tom Wolfe
The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned.

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
Never try to fit in; it's sheer folly. Be an odd, eccentric character. People will volunteer information to you.

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
America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down!

Tom Wolfe
As hand-to-hand combat has gradually disappeared from our civilization, even in wartime... Americans have turned to the automobile to satisfy their love of direct aggression.

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 country of ours and reclaim its literary property.

Tom Wolfe
The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

Tom Wolfe
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
You go to bed every night thinking that you've written the most brilliant passage ever done, which somehow the next day you realize is sheer drivel.

Tom Wolfe
The idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

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

Tom Wolfe
His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways...while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness.

Tom Wolfe
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later...

Tom Wolfe
Interviewer: So you weren't surprised by the Dan Rather debacle?

Tom Wolfe