Tom Wolfe Quotes

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Tom Wolfe

Profession : Journalist

Birth : March 2, 1931

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.

Tom Wolfe

A cult is a religion with no political power.

Tom Wolfe

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

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

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.

Tom Wolfe

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.

Tom Wolfe

I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.

Tom Wolfe

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

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

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.

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

Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.

Tom Wolfe

You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.

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

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

Tom Wolfe