Tom Wolfe

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.

It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.

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

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

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

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

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.

don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!