Tom Wolfe Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

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
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.

Tom Wolfe
How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements...How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles.

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.

Tom Wolfe
What I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

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
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
... 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
A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance—And the myths that actually touched you at that time —not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman.

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

Tom Wolfe
The New York Times bestseller list only has four categories. There ought to be a fifth category for autobiography. Or perhaps we should call it handicapped nonfiction.

Tom Wolfe
The best you can say is that New York is held together by competing antagonisms that tend to cancel one another out.

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
They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.

Tom Wolfe
Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, Stop! ? No, she shouldn't put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, No, Hoyt, in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table.

Tom Wolfe
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.

Tom Wolfe
The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style.

Tom Wolfe
And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.

Tom Wolfe
Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.

Tom Wolfe
Radical Chic…is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its tradition—Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.

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
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

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
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
A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.

Tom Wolfe