Top 120 Tom Wolfe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.”

— Tom Wolfe

2. “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

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

— Tom Wolfe

4. “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”

— Tom Wolfe

5. “A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you’re weak.”

— Tom Wolfe

6. “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

7. “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

8. “I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths – anybody’s myths. But it was created for a rational age.”

— Tom Wolfe

9. “If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.”

— Tom Wolfe

10. “If you label it this, then it can’t be that.”

— Tom Wolfe

11. “The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.”

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

13. “I’m a great believer in outlines.”

— Tom Wolfe

14. “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

15. “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

16. “You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.”

— Tom Wolfe

17. “Put your good where it will do the most!”

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

21. “Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later...”

— Tom Wolfe

22. “America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down!”

— Tom Wolfe

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Tom Wolfe

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “There are going to be times when you can’t wait for somebody. Now you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”

— Tom Wolfe

25. “The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.”

— Tom Wolfe

26. “Lances and plumes! I’m a knight! Come up and fight! Why hold back! Knights of the Right Stuff!”

— Tom Wolfe

27. “The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion.”

— Tom Wolfe

28. “The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and moon came out – and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles.”

— Tom Wolfe

29. “Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.”

— Tom Wolfe

30. “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.”

— Tom Wolfe

31. “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.”

— Tom Wolfe

32. “Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.”

— Tom Wolfe

33. “That flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn’t the emotion itself and it isn’t the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.”

— Tom Wolfe

34. “Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about.”

— Tom Wolfe

35. “Andy Warhol. Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois.”

— Tom Wolfe

36. “Naturally you needed a man with the courage to ride on top of a rocket, and you were grateful that such men existed. Nevertheless, their training was not a very complicated business.”

— Tom Wolfe

37. “Mountain Girl tries to concentrate, but the words swim like great waves of... The words swim by and she hears the sound but it is like her cerebral cortex is tuned out to the content of it. Her mind keeps rolling and spinning over another set of data, always the same. Like – the eternal desperate calculation. In short, Mountain Girl is pregnant.”

— Tom Wolfe

38. “The simple truth is that the Web the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does, and only that. All the rest is Digibabble.”

— Tom Wolfe

39. “As Sigmund Freud would put it thirty-five years later in similar circumstances, “Many enemies, much honor.” Darwin.”

— Tom Wolfe

40. “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”

— Tom Wolfe

41. “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.”

— Tom Wolfe

42. “We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.”

— Tom Wolfe

43. “If a monkey has become a man – what may not a man become?”

— Tom Wolfe

44. “And – of course! – the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren’t qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.”

— Tom Wolfe

45. “They were alone in the elevator. Hoyt didn’t even wait for the doors to close before he started kissing Charlotte, pushing her up against the back wall, caressing her breasts, pressing his body against hers from chest to groin. She kissed him back in a spirited fashion and felt cool doing it, let her body go limp against the wall, wrapped her arms around his neck, allowed him to do whatever he wanted to her.”

— Tom Wolfe

46. “She’s a gambler. She’s not the type to play it safe. She likes to mix it up, and her game is – well, it’s men. Your game is the law, mine is investments, hers is men.”

— Tom Wolfe

47. “The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

49. “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

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

— Tom Wolfe