Tom Wolfe
You can't go home again.
What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
To a man of sixty... one of the grimmest reminders of the Reaper's approach comes when his doctors, the people who have attended to his body for decades, begin retiring on him... or dying on him... or both.
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
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.
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 of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.
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.
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
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.
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.
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions - Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.
Pornography was the great vice of the Seventies; plutography - the graphic depiction of the acts of the rich - the the great vice of the Eighties.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.
Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.