Tom Wolfe Short Quotes

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The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
... 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
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
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