Tom Wolfe Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
You don't need to worry about what an incalculable luxury literature is. Entire civilizations are founded without any literature at all and without anybody missing it. It's only later on when there's a big enough class of indolent drones to write the stuff and read the stuff that you have literature.

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
I now know what writer's block is. It's the fear you cannot do what you've announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn't worth doing.

Tom Wolfe
... Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs.

Tom Wolfe
There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening.

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.

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

Tom Wolfe
Pornography was the great vice of the Seventies; pluto-graphy – the graphic depiction of the acts of the rich – is the great vice of the Eighties.

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

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

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
I find that memory decay is very rapid. Even going to sleep and waking up the next day, there's an awful lot that simply doesn't come back. At least it doesn't come back accurately.

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

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
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
I found it extremely difficult to shift from nonfiction to fiction and for reasons that surprised me. One was that I didn't face up to the most obvious thing of all... which is that in nonfiction you are handed the plot. You are handed the characters. It just didn't dawn on me how much I was now depriving myself of.

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

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
I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!... I'm Me!... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought... ego... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game...

Tom Wolfe