Quote

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

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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
Acting
Scenarios
Littles
Trapped
Little
Script
Going
Mad
Like
Scripts
People
Everywhere
Movie
Everybody
Scenario

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The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
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A cult is a religion with no political power.
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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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(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.
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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.
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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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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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I'm a great believer in outlines.
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My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.
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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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Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later.
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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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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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I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television, before long there was this procession of people of all kinds, walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd there was no sound.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
Tom Wolfe
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The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
Tom Wolfe