Tom Wolfe quotes

Tom Wolfe was an American author and journalist, renowned for his contributions to New Journalism. His distinctive writing style and sharp social observations made a lasting impact on modern literature. He helped shape contemporary narrative non-fiction and is celebrated for works such as "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Here are 92 of his quotes:

Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus ... or off the bus."

Tom Wolfe

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

Tom Wolfe

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

Tom Wolfe

My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.

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

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

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

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

Tom Wolfe

The Internet is the modern form of knitting. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it - a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.

Tom Wolfe

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Tom Wolfe

At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.

Tom Wolfe

The demolition derby is, pure and simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times.

Tom Wolfe

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

Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.

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

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

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.

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

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

Tom Wolfe

Nonfiction is never going to die.

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