Tom Wolfe > Quotes

“You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.”
― Tom Wolfe

“A cult is a religion with no political power.”
― Tom Wolfe

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
― Tom Wolfe

“Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.”
― tom wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.”
― Tom Wolfe

“A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.”
― Tom Wolfe

“You're either on the bus or off the bus.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Put your good where it will do the most!”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Bullshit reigns.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

“I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

“What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.”
― Tom Wolfe

“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it. ”
― Tom Wolfe

“If you label it this, then it can't be that.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman.”
― Tom Wolfe

“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.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.”
― Tom Wolfe

“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.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“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 Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for. At this moment I'm a man with complete tranquillity...I've been a real estate developer for most of my life, and I can tell you that a developer lives with the opposite of tranquillity, which is perturbation. You're perturbed about something all the time. You build your first development, and right away you want to build a bigger one, and you want a bigger house to live in, and if it ain't in Buckhead, you might as well cut your wrists. Soon's you got that, you want a plantation, tens of thousands of acres devoted solely to shooting quail, because you know of four or five developers who've already got that. And soon's you get that, you want a place on Sea Island and a Hatteras cruiser and a spread northwest of Buckhead, near the Chattahoochee, where you can ride a horse during the week, when you're not down at the plantation, plus a ranch in Wyoming, Colorado, or Montana, because truly successful men in Atlanta and New York all got their ranches, and of course now you need a private plane, a big one, too, a jet, a Gulfstream Five, because who's got the patience and the time and the humility to fly commercially, even to the plantation, much less out to a ranch? What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you.”
― Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

“The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”
― Tom Wolfe

“Your self…is other people, all the people you're tied to, and it's only a thread.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

“It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“Everything in everybody’s life is … significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

“I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles... and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me!... I'm Me!... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought... ego... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game...”
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test