Tom Wolfe Quotes (47 Quotes)


    How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements...How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles.

    Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.


    worked so far out beyond the frontiers of conventional studio art that they have no names themselves for the forms they create.

    A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.


    The New York Times bestseller list only has four categories. There ought to be a fifth category for autobiography. Or perhaps we should call it handicapped nonfiction.

    We really believe that we can continue to separate ourselves as a company and deliver a different level of service by being closer to our dealers in the marketplaces.

    This beach is verboten for people practically 50 years old,

    It taught me a lesson, ... You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.

    The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

    He is politically a real maverick. It's very idiosyncratic, and I mean that in a good way.

    Stone was the most prominent architect in America, and he decided that the modernist movement in architecture -- in other words, the parade of glass boxes that marched across America -- had become exhausted, not worth pursuing anymore,

    To a man of sixty... one of the grimmest reminders of the Reaper's approach comes when his doctors, the people who have attended to his body for decades, begin retiring on him... or dying on him... or both.

    The term most people use to describe Lewis is patrician, and he does have that air. He's very much part of a social network. He does know a wide range of people in the upper orders. That's why I think he has a lot of fun with his left-leaning views.

    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.

    Not Seeing is Believing, you ninny, but Believing is Seeing. For modern art has become completely literary the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

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

    They are a very prominent name in the bromeliad business, and they were long before coming to the U.S.

    My parents must have had tough decisions to make, but I was never called on to bear witness to their anxiety. To some people that might sound like repression, but I think repression can be a positive value.

    A cult is a religion with no political power.

    His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways . . . while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness.

    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.

    A glorius place, a glorious age, I tell you A very Neon Renaissance And the myths that actually touched you at that timenot Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneasbut Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman.

    Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

    The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

    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.

    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.

    Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

    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.

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


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

    There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.

    Ed Doctorow is a great guy, a wonderful writer, great company - he's just being fashionable, that's all. In this country, there's nothing daring about going against the government.

    What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse.

    Kenny Smith and I started working on a grant after Ivan. We finally got it and now we are ready for the worst. We never lost water after Ivan, but it got close. It made me real nervous.

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

    Natural gas is not as dangerous when it is out in the open. But when it gets trapped, like it did in the house, you've got a potential bomb.

    Anything that calls itself new in this world is doomed to a short life.

    The idea was to prove at every foot of the way up ... that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff, and could move higher and higher . . .

    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.

    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.

    Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.

    The Lifethat feeling The Lifethe late 1940s early 1950s American Teenage Drive-In Life.

    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.

    It was a scary situation. I don't know why it (house) didn't explode with the car on top of the gas meter. The meter on the house was disintegrated.

    I think it's the only completely American sport that there is. Most of the team sports are a variation on the old medieval tournaments, but stock car racing is so American. It's astounding to me how many people are interested in stock car racing.


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    - The Bonfire of the Vanities

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