There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them, and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first a physical quality then it is a quality of the spirit.

— 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

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 Wolfe

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time.

— Tom Wolfe

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 Wolfe

They were Archer's second set of children a d paragons of contemporary teenage cynicism. They enjoyed setting fire to the tails of tender thoughts.

— Tom Wolfe

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

— Tom Wolfe

Vulgar, but not as vulgar as Louis Vuitton, thought Sherman.

— Tom Wolfe

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

(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