Tom Wolfe Quotes

Quotes about:

• Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.

  Tom Wolfe

  People, Mad, Acting

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.168, Macmillan

  34 Copy quote

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

  Tom Wolfe

  Conservative, Liberalism, Conservatism

  34 Copy quote

• Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

  Tom Wolfe

  Love, Expression, Ultimate

  71 Copy quote

• A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.

  Tom Wolfe

  Lying, May, Fool

  Tom Wolfe (2002). “The Bonfire of the Vanities: A Novel”, p.283, Macmillan

  36 Copy quote

• The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.

  Tom Wolfe

  Writing, Fiction, Problem

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• A cult is a religion with no political power.

  Tom Wolfe

  Religious, Philosophy, Power

  In Our Time ch. 2 (1980) See Feibleman 1

  94 Copy quote

• 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.

  Tom Wolfe

  Funny, Leadership, Believe

  22 Copy quote

• In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.

  Tom Wolfe

  Years, America, People

  Tom Wolfe (2010). “Hooking Up”, p.1929, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  9 Copy quote

• No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.

  Tom Wolfe

  Brain, Machines, Speech

  "Tom Wolfe on How Speech Made Us Human". Interview with Steve Heilig, www.sfgate.com. March 16, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

• Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. ~Tom Wolfe

  Tom Wolfe

  Dad, Children, Father

  30 Copy quote

• You're either on the bus or off the bus.

  Tom Wolfe

  Hippie, Across The Universe, Pranksters

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.97, Macmillan

  20 Copy quote

• The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

  Tom Wolfe

  Lonely, Loneliness, Being Alone

  "The American Mercury", p. 467, "The Anatomy of Loneliness", October 1941.

  16 Copy quote

• Put your good where it will do the most!

  Tom Wolfe

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.145, Macmillan

  18 Copy quote

• I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.

  Tom Wolfe

  Waiting, Forgiving, Never Forget

  24 Copy quote

• The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned.

  Tom Wolfe

  World, Divine, Mass

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.149, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• [Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.

  Tom Wolfe

  Men, Knowing, Perception

  Tom Wolfe (1999). “The electric kool-aid acid test”, Bantam Dell Pub Group

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Tom Wolfe

  Life, Loneliness, Being Alone

  "The American Mercury", p. 467, "The Anatomy of Loneliness", October 1941.

  15 Copy quote

• Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.

  Tom Wolfe

  Apologizing, Kool Aid

  Tom Wolfe (1982). “The Purple Decades: A Reader”, p.229, Macmillan

  16 Copy quote

• Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.

  Tom Wolfe

  Mind, Groups, Becoming

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.97, Macmillan

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• What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

  Tom Wolfe

  Baby, Mean, Doors

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.62, Macmillan

  23 Copy quote

• Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.

  Tom Wolfe

  Care, Sometimes, Realizing

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.214, Macmillan

  13 Copy quote

• If you label it this, then it can't be that.

  Tom Wolfe

  Labels, Ifs

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.144, Macmillan

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• a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality - the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it... in this moment... this supreme moment... this Kairos.

  Tom Wolfe

  Past, Doors, Feelings

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.163, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

  Tom Wolfe

  Giving, Imagination, Bigger

  26 Copy quote

• I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!... I'm Me!... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought... ego... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game.

  Tom Wolfe

  Girl, War, Games

  Tom Wolfe (1999). “The electric kool-aid acid test”, Bantam Dell Pub Group

  12 Copy quote

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