Tom Wolfe
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.Collection: Society
A cult is a religion with no political power.Collection: Power
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.Collection: Love
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.Collection: Amazing
Nerds... the 'nerd' has never been precisely defined, thanks to the psychological complexity of the creature. The word has connotations of some level of intelligence. The typical nerd is a male with intelligence but no sense of giving it a manly face.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Romantic
There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Men
There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.Collection: Famous
I can remember that on the shelves at home, there were these books by Thomas Wolfe. 'Look Homeward Angel' and 'Of Time and the River.' 'Of Time and the River' had just come out when I was aware of his name. My parents had a hard time convincing me that he was no kin whatsoever. My attitude was, 'Well, what's he doing on the shelf, then?'Collection: Attitude
Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.Collection: Humor
If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.
I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one.
So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year... a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade - many other countries. So they really don't forget.
People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays; it's one exclamation point to another.
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.
Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society.
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting; you have the people on the right. But the train's on track. They just keep ploughing ahead.
It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.
'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.
Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.
To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don't know about.
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
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.
The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.
My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.
I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'
Nonfiction is never going to die.
Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course.
If I had my choice, I would be writing by typewriter. I worked on newspapers for 10 years. I typed with the touch system, and unfortunately, you can't keep typewriters going today. You have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked. You have to - it's a horrible search to try to find missing parts. So I went to the computer.
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.
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.
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.
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for.
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.
I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
I'm a great believer in outlines.
I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.