Quotes by Tom Wolfe

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

“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one...”

“(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.”

“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....”

“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 compe...”

“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it. ”

“Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice systemright herethrough the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was ...”

“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 devou...”

“What was it - this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an academic star, being applauded over and over again as a ...”

“A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirti...”

“Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppos...”

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

“Can't nobody make us do a thang once we git hard against it. And if anybody don't like that, you don't have to explain a thang to'm. All you got to say is, 'I'm Charlotte Simmons, and I don't hold ...”

“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.”

“That's not the end of the world! This is the time to cut loose! To really learn about everything! To learn about guys, to really get to know them! Really find out what goes on in the world! You jus...”

“Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman.”

“Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.”

“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 woma...”

“Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communic...”