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If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.

Tom Wolfe

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Tom Wolfe
Age: 88 †
Born: 1930
Born: March 2
Died: 2018
Died: May 14
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Prosaist
Reporter
Screenwriter
Writer
Richmond
Virginia
Thomas Kennerly
Jr. Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly Tom Wolfe
Jr.
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe
Mugged
Conservatism
Arrested
Liberalism
Liberal
Conservative

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By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.
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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.
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I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
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Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
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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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Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
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A cult is a religion with no political power.
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Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
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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.
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His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways...while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness.
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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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Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
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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.
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, Please God, don't let me look poor. In the year 2000, they prayed, Please God, don't let me look old. Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.
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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.
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Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.
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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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The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
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Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: You're either on the bus...or off the bus.
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People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that's the way people think. I don't think people think in essays it's one exclamation point to another.
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