QuoteProject
To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don't know about.
Tom Wolfe
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Writing is a journey of exploration and discovery, even for experienced writers.

In this quote, Tom Wolfe expresses the thrill of writing as an adventure rather than a mere expression of known experiences. He emphasizes the joy found in exploring unknown topics through research and reporting, challenging the conventional advice that writers should only write about what they are familiar with.

Themes

WritingDiscoveryAdventureReportingExploration

In practice

Example use cases

During a writing workshop, to inspire participants about the process of writing.

More from Tom Wolfe

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 WolfeRead
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 WolfeRead
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 WolfeRead
Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So, qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve - of how fast a man is willing to take a curve.
Tom WolfeRead
I have discovered that for me - now, maybe it doesn't work for everybody - for me, it is much more effective to arrive at any situation as a man from Mars than to try to fit in.
Tom WolfeRead
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 woman, now, and the man was gone.
Tom WolfeRead

Similar quotes

The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.
Roland BarthesRead
I try to bring the audience's own drama - tears and laughter they know about - to them.
Judy GarlandRead
Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
Marina AbramovicRead
Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
T. E. LawrenceRead
If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.
Bernardo BertolucciRead
Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.
Henri Cartier-BressonRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.