Tom Wolfe

“Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.”

“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.”

“Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.”

“Loneliness wasn't just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt... it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn't merely that she had no friends. She didn't even have a sanctuary in which she could simply be alone.”

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

“Your self…is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.”

“I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.”

“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.”

“'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.”

“When I went to high school, my most passionate desire was to be a professional baseball player. But something within me told me that was not going to happen.”

“A cult is a religion with no political power.”

“I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for.”

“I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course.”

“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.”

“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.”

“They were Archer's second set of children an d paragons of contemporary teenage cynicism. They enjoyed setting fire to the tails of tender thoughts.”

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

“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.”