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
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fiction requires believability, while non-fiction is based on real events and facts.
Tom Wolfe highlights a fundamental difference between fiction and non-fiction in this quote. In fiction, the narrative must maintain a certain level of plausibility to resonate with readers and feel authentic, while non-fiction, grounded in reality, doesn't face the same constraints and can deal with complexities and absurdities that are true to life.
Themes
FictionNon-FictionPlausibilityRealityWriting
In practice
Example use cases
In a literature class discussing the boundaries of genre.
More from Tom Wolfe
All quotes βAnd - 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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