Quotes About 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.

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, of all people, was the first person who ever told me about rap music. He liked to go to Harlem and the Bronx to watch the crews battle it out, and he was writing rap lyrics of his own.

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!

Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.

A young reporter for the Post named Tom Wolfe followed up after my talk with an interview. The Post ran his story, "You Can So Beat the Gambling House at Blackjack, Math Expert Insists." He was curious rather than skeptical, sympathetic but probing. Wolfe later became one of America's most famous authors.

I was with Tom Wolfe at the launch of Apollo 17, which led him to 'The Right Stuff.'

I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

In a famous essay in Esquire, the master storyteller Tom Wolfe presents Robert Noyce, the charismatic leader of Fairchild's eight traitors, as the father of Silicon Valley.[51] Noyce came from a family of Congregational ministers in Grinnell, Iowa, the very middle of the Midwest, where the land was as flat as the social structure. When Noyce moved out to California, he brought Grinnell with him, "as though sewn into the lining of his coat.

I don't read a ton of fiction, but Tom Wolfe's death got me to pick up 'The Bonfire of the Vanities.' I'm a slow reader, but wow - I ended up devouring it in about six days. I'm fascinated with that period, the '80s, when the country was turning around but it seemed like New York and other cities were just hopelessly lost.

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.

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

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.

I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.

Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.'

IN 1998, TOM WOLFE brought me his proposal for a new novel, A Man in Full. I didn't feel it would be right for us to try to repeat the Bonfire of the Vanities serialization.

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.

don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door.