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
American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting; you have the people on the right. But the train’s on track. They just keep ploughing ahead. – 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
‘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
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
Working on newspapers, you’re writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor – women can’t drive, things like that. That’s about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness. – 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
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
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
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 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
The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity. – Tom Wolfe
By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I. – 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
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
Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He’s so good – I mean, practically anything I’ve ever read of his I’ve really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society. – 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
On Wall Street he and a few others – how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that… Masters of the Universe. – Tom Wolfe
This is the artist, then, life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave. – 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
I have no idea who coined the term ‘the New Journalism,’ or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with ‘new’ in it is just begging for trouble, of course. – Tom Wolfe
Nerds… the ‘nerd’ has never been precisely defined, thanks to the psychological complexity of the creature. The word has connotations of some level of intelligence. The typical nerd is a male with intelligence but no sense of giving it a manly face. – Tom Wolfe
In the U.S., the term ‘general aviation’ means its exact opposite, the way ‘public school’ does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public. – Tom Wolfe
