Quotes By Tom Wolfe

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

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

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

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

That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Nonfiction is never going to die.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.

I'm a great believer in outlines.

A cult is a religion with no political power.

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.

On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.

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

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

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