Top 120 Tom Wolfe Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Then he put that one down behind a framed sepia-tone picture of a baseball player named Cecil Travis and picked up another one and tilted it back to his lips.”

— Tom Wolfe

52. “The first person to refer to Darwin’s tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61.”

— Tom Wolfe

53. “A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance – And the myths that actually touched you at that time – not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas – but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman.”

— Tom Wolfe

54. “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”

— Tom Wolfe

55. “She was wearing a skirt and a big-shouldered jacket of a royal blue that was fashionable in France, a blue-and-white-striped silk blouse, and electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes.”

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

57. “A persistent case of the bingos was enough to wash a man out of night carrier landings. That did not mean you were finished as a Navy pilot. It merely meant that you were finished so far as carrier ops were concerned, which meant that you were finished so far as combat was concerned, which meant you were no longer in the competition, no longer ascending the pyramid, no longer qualified for the company of those with the right stuff.”

— Tom Wolfe

58. “I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I’m a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.”

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

60. “A sublime state, it was, and it didn’t cost much. The bus stop was only across the street. There was scarcely a chance for his impatience over Campbell’s tiny step to spoil this refreshing nip of fatherhood he took each morning.”

— Tom Wolfe

61. “Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.”

— Tom Wolfe

62. “It got to be an American custom, like talk shows, Face the Nation, marriage counseling, marathon encounters, or zoning hearings.”

— Tom Wolfe

63. “The congressmen in the room just wanted to see them, to use their position to arrange a personal audience, to gaze upon them with their own eyes across the committee table, no more than four feet away, to shake hands with them, occupy the same space on this earth with them for and hour or so, fawn over them, pay homage to them, bathe in their magical aura, feel the radiation of their righteous stuff, salute them, wish upon them the smile of God...”

— Tom Wolfe

64. “No wonder marriages used to hold up better. Sherman’s parents and their friends had all had plenty of servants, and the servants had worked long hours and lived in. If you were unwilling to argue in front of the servants, then there wasn’t much opportunity to argue at all.”

— Tom Wolfe

65. “Many wives of fighter pilots would end up looking on helplessly as their husbands grew more and more distant, a fact they would acknowledge in what were meant as lighthearted remarks, such as: “I’m only his mistress – he’s married to an airplane.” Often she would be overstating their intimacy; the actual mistress would be someone she didn’t know about.”

— Tom Wolfe

66. “It was a chorus! A rain of garbage! A Rigoletto from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx!”

— Tom Wolfe

67. “By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the ‘real world.’ So I started working for newspapers.”

— Tom Wolfe

68. “What makes you think you can come before the bench waving the banner of community pressure? The law is not a creature of the few or of the many.”

— Tom Wolfe

69. “Most people don’t read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page.”

— Tom Wolfe

70. “Half a century ago, only Teilhard foresaw what is now known as the Internet. What Teilhard’s superiors in the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy thought about it all in the 1920s, however, was not much. The plain fact was that Teilhard accepted the Darwinian theory of evolution. He argued that biological evolution had been nothing more than God’s first step in an infinitely grander design. Nevertheless, he accepted it.”

— Tom Wolfe

71. “You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.”

— Tom Wolfe

72. “How the stories circulated on every campus! If you weren’t making $250,000 a year within five years, than you were either grossly stupid or grossly lazy. That was the word. By age 30, $500,000–and that sum had the taint of the mediocre. By age forty you were either making a million a year or you were timid and incompetent. Make it now! That motto burned in every heart, like myocarditis.”

— Tom Wolfe

73. “Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below. There.”

— Tom Wolfe

74. “They presumed a knowledge and an intimacy they did not have and had no right to. Some.”

— Tom Wolfe

75. “If you become indignant, this elevates you to the plane of “intellectual.”

— Tom Wolfe

76. “The fact was that theories – Greenberg’s – about Pollock – were beginning to affect Pollock. Greenberg hadn’t created Pollock’s reputation, but he was its curator, custodian, brass polisher, and repairman, and he was terrific at it.”

— Tom Wolfe

77. “I make out a schoolbus... glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.”

— Tom Wolfe

78. “Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.”

— Tom Wolfe

79. “All of them, artists and theorists, were talking as if their conscious aim was to create a totally immediate art, lucid, stripped of all the dreadful baggage of history, an art fully revealed, honest, as honest as the flat-out integral picture plane.”

— Tom Wolfe

80. “Art is a creed, not a craft.”

— Tom Wolfe

81. “The difference in Darwin’s case was that he put together his story in an increasingly rational age. It.”

— Tom Wolfe

82. “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 prodigy, take the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn’t have put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation.”

— Tom Wolfe

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

— Tom Wolfe

84. “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

85. “I’ve never met an American who wanted to build an empire.”

— Tom Wolfe

86. “The figures were averages and averages applied to those with average stuff.”

— Tom Wolfe

87. “In this respect, Darwinism was typical of the more primitive cosmogonies. They avoided the question of how the world developed ex nihilo. Darwin.”

— Tom Wolfe

88. “The seven men pressed on. They were tired of the designation of “capsule” for the Mercury vehicle. The term as much as declared that the man inside was not a pilot but an experimental animal in a pod. Gradually, everybody began trying to work the term “spacecraft” into NASA publications and syllabuses. Next.”

— Tom Wolfe

89. “Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.”

— Tom Wolfe

90. “It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that ’moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.”

— Tom Wolfe

91. “It is the responsibility of intellectuals,” he said, “to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.”

— Tom Wolfe

92. “My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.”

— Tom Wolfe

93. “What have the breathtaking advances in communications technology done for the human mind? Beats me. SAT scores among the top tenth of high-school students in the United States, that fraction who are prime candidates for higher education in any period, are lower today than they were in the early 1960s. Believe, if you wish, that computers and the Internet in the classroom will change all that, but I assure you, it is sheer Digibabble.”

— Tom Wolfe

94. “Wilson compressed his theory into one sentence during an interview. Every human brain, he said, is born not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience but as “an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.” The negative might be developed well or it might be developed poorly, but all you were going to get was what was already on the negative at birth.”

— Tom Wolfe

95. “Huxley became such an ardent Darwinist not because he believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection – he never did – but because Darwin was obviously an atheist, just as he was. No.”

— Tom Wolfe

96. “To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech.”

— Tom Wolfe

97. “He had the gaunt and haunted athletic look of those who stare daily down the bony gullet of the great god Aerobics.”

— Tom Wolfe

98. “The only thing that had truly stuck in Sherman’s mind about Christopher Marlowe, after nine years at Buckley, four years at St. Paul’s, and four years at Yale, was that you were, in fact, supposed to know who Christopher Marlowe was.”

— Tom Wolfe

99. “The power of the human brain was so far beyond the boundaries of natural selection that the term became meaningless in explaining the origins of man.”

— Tom Wolfe

100. “Nonfiction is never going to die.”

— Tom Wolfe