"On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe."
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Quote collection
Tom Wolfe quotes (page 3 of 4)
68 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's."
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"My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me."
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"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!"
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"The world was simply and sheerly divided into 'the aware', those who had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of 'the unaware', 'the unmusical', 'the unattuned."
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"My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer."
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"You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested."
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"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."
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"it is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon."
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"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."
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"Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page."
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"Nonfiction is never going to die."
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"Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal."
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"They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard."
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"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."
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"I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age."
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"If you label it this, then it can't be that."
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"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."
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"God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism."
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"I don't think journalists should talk about whom they're voting for."
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