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

More quotes by Tom Wolfe

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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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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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Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
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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.
Tom Wolfe
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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.
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You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.
Tom Wolfe
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A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.
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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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Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.
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If you label it this, then it can't be that.
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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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don't just describe an emotion, arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door.
Tom Wolfe
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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.
Tom Wolfe
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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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Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: You're either on the bus...or off the bus.
Tom Wolfe
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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.
Tom Wolfe
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I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
Tom Wolfe
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Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
Tom Wolfe
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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.
Tom Wolfe