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
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Tom Wolfe emphasizes the significance of nonfiction in modern literature.
In this quote, Tom Wolfe expresses his conviction that nonfiction literature has played a crucial role in shaping cultural and societal understandings during the latter part of the 20th century. He suggests that the truthful accounts and explorations found in nonfiction exceed the imaginative narratives of fiction in their importance and influence on readers and society as a whole.
Themes
NonfictionLiteratureImportance20Th CenturyTruth
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the relevance of books in today's society, this quote can highlight the value of nonfiction.
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.
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
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There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.
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Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
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Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.
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I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
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Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
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