Thomas Wolfe Quotes (24 Quotes)

The modern picture of the artist began to form The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever -- in short, to be the bohemian.

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.

Making the world safe for hypocrisy.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded . . .

So, then, to every man his chance - to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity - to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him - thi

Sleep lay upon the wilderness, it lay across the faces of nations, it lay like silence on the hearts of sleeping men and low upon lowlands and high upon hills, flowed gently sleep, smooth-sliding sleep - sleep - sleep.

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

America - it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later...that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.

Men will often say they have 'found themselves' when they have really been worn down into a groove by the brutal and compulsive force of circumstance.

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.