Quotes from Tom Wolfe

Nonfiction is never going to die.

If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me.

Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.

I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.

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.

I'm a great believer in outlines.

[He] adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector.

The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening

The Life—that feeling—The Life—the late 1940s early 1950s American Teenage Drive-In Life.

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

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

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 glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance—And the myths that actually touched you at that time—not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman.

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

Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs.

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.

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.

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.

A cult is a religion with no political power

Carol Doda's Breasts are up there the way one imagines Electra's should have been, two incredible mammiform protrusions, no mere pliable mass of feminine tissues and fats there but living arterial sculpture––viscera spigot––great blown-up aureate morning glories.

It helps to know from a very early age what you want to do. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer, even though I couldn't even read. It was mainly because I thought of my father as a writer.