Tom Wolfe quotes - page 4

You're either on the bus or off the bus. (Tom Wolfe)
[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. View quote
Tom Wolfe
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature... That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Put your good where it will do the most! View quote
Tom Wolfe
Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols. View quote
Tom Wolfe
The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned. View quote
Tom Wolfe
don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting. View quote
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. View quote
Tom Wolfe
America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down! (Tom Wolfe)
(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write. View quote
Tom Wolfe
A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman. View quote
Tom Wolfe
And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway. View quote
Tom Wolfe
There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology...the new way of killing time. View quote
Tom Wolfe
He talks in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about - "-there's been no creativity," he is saying, "and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move to -" - all in a plain country accent about something - well, to be frank, I didn't know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said. "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," he said. He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch - lightning. View quote
Tom Wolfe
Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, "Stop!”? No, she shouldn't put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, "No, Hoyt,” in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table. View quote
Tom Wolfe