Zitat des Tages von Tom Wolfe:
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.
It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.
A cult is a religion with no political power.
I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire.
At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
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.
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it's an example of freedom from religion.
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course.
'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves.
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
'Back to Blood' really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except to the gym.
My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me.
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.
Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society.
You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.
I never forget. I never forgive. I can wait. I find it very easy to harbor a grudge. I have scores to settle.
The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.
It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
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.
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.
Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.
I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it!
I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind.
My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.
Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed.
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
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.
Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.
