Quotes by Tom Wolfe

About Tom Wolfe:

Thomas Kennerly is an American author and journalist, best known for his association and influence over the New Journalism literary movement in which literary techniques are used in objective even-handed journalism. Beginning his career as a reporter, he soon became one of the most culturally significant figures of the 1960s after the publication of books such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) and two collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, released in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and was a great commercial success.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.

Tom Wolfe

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.

Tom Wolfe

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

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.

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 t...

Tom Wolfe

Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.

Tom Wolfe

I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.

Tom Wolfe

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.

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

I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.

Tom Wolfe

Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.

Tom Wolfe

Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.

Tom Wolfe

'Back to Blood' really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except to the gym.

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.

Tom Wolfe

I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most ...

Tom Wolfe

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitar...

Tom Wolfe

(W)hat 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

The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's.

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.

Tom Wolfe

Author Bio

  • NameTom Wolfe
  • DescriptionAmerican writer and journalist
  • BornMarch 2, 1931
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Novelist; Reporter; Essayist; Writer
  • WorksThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Right Stuff; A Man In Full; Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers; The Bonfire Of The Vanities; Back To Blood
  • AwardsNational Humanities Medal; National Book Award