The collection / 33 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1965 AD

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.

Tom Wolfe / quote

02c. 1965 AD

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

Tom Wolfe / quote

03c. 1965 AD

Nerds... the 'nerd' has never been precisely defined, thanks to the psychological complexity of the creature. The word has connotations of some level of intelligence. The typical nerd is a male with intelligence but no sense of giving it a manly face.

Tom Wolfe / quote

04c. 1965 AD

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Tom Wolfe / quote

05c. 1965 AD

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 / quote

06c. 1965 AD

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.

Tom Wolfe / quote

07c. 1965 AD

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.

Tom Wolfe / quote

08c. 1965 AD

American government is like a train on a track. You have the people on the left shouting you have the people on the right. But the train's on track. They just keep ploughing ahead.

Tom Wolfe / quote

09c. 1965 AD

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.

Tom Wolfe / quote