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The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.

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
Plausible
Fiction
True
Problem
Writing

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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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Even hostile parodies admit from the start that the target has a distinct voice.
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Dear Mother, I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and...
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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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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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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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A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.
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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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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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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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Nonfiction is never going to die.
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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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Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.
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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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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'm a great believer in outlines.
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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.
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