Tag: Tom Wolfe
-
Nonfiction is never going to die.
Tom Wolfe
-
I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound.
Tom Wolfe
-
The ‘New York Honk,’ as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile… and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.
Tom Wolfe
-
If I had my choice, I would be writing by typewriter. I worked on newspapers for 10 years. I typed with the touch system, and unfortunately, you can’t keep typewriters going today. You have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked. You have to – it’s a horrible search to try to find missing parts. So I went to the computer.
Tom Wolfe
-
Everyone is taught the essentials of writing for at least 13 years, maybe more if they go to college. Nobody is taught music or tap dancing that way.
Tom Wolfe
-
So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year… a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade – many other countries. So they really don’t forget.
Tom Wolfe
-
Once you have speech, you don’t have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don’t like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.
Tom Wolfe
-
By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
Tom Wolfe
-
Working on newspapers, you’re writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor – women can’t drive, things like that. That’s about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.
Tom Wolfe
-
Fortunately, the world is full of people with information compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don’t know. They’re some of the greatest allies that any writer has.
Tom Wolfe