Tom Wolfe Quotes

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Tom Wolfe

Profession : Journalist

Birth : March 2, 1931

I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.

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

If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.

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

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

Tom Wolfe

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

Tom Wolfe

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.

Tom Wolfe

'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug?

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

The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.

Tom Wolfe

I hate stories in which a person has an occupation and you never see him working at it, like all those marvelous Cary Grant movies where he's a surgeon, and you never see him in the operating room.

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 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

It helps to know from a very early age what you want to do. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer, even though I couldn't even read. It was mainly because I thought of my father as a writer.

Tom Wolfe

Everyone is taught the essentials of writing for at least 13 years, maybe more if they go to college. Nobody is taught music or tap dancing that way.

Tom Wolfe

When I went to high school, my most passionate desire was to be a professional baseball player. But something within me told me that was not going to happen.

Tom Wolfe

I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that.

Tom Wolfe