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. – Tom Wolfe
If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested. – Tom Wolfe
To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don’t know about. – 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. – Tom Wolfe
I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect… of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted – first!… in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods. – Tom Wolfe
It’s fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed. – Tom Wolfe
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. – Tom Wolfe
I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it. – 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
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. – 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
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
In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific. – Tom Wolfe
So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year… a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade – many other countries. So they really don’t forget. – Tom Wolfe
The ‘New York Honk,’ as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile… and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk. – Tom Wolfe
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me. – Tom Wolfe
That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning. – Tom Wolfe
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves. – Tom Wolfe
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. – 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
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. – 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
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. – 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
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism. – 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
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
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. – Tom Wolfe
