Tom Wolfe Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.”

“In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting; you have the people on the right. But the train's on track. They just keep ploughing ahead.”

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

“God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.”

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