Tom Wolfe Quotes

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Tom Wolfe

Profession : Journalist

Birth : March 2, 1931

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

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

Tom Wolfe

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.

Tom Wolfe

I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

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

Tom Wolfe

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

Tom Wolfe

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

Tom Wolfe

God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

Tom Wolfe

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

Tom Wolfe

I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it!

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 that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.

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

By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.

Tom Wolfe

I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first!... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

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.'

Tom Wolfe

Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So, qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve - of how fast a man is willing to take a curve.

Tom Wolfe