Quotes by Wolfe, Thomas

"Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best."

Wolfe, Thomas on death   

"It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved."

Wolfe, Thomas on leadership   

"A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested."

Wolfe, Thomas on liberals   

"Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you."

Wolfe, Thomas on life   

"Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird."

Wolfe, Thomas on architecture   

"Making the world safe for hypocrisy."

Wolfe, Thomas on army and navy   

"The surest cure for vanity is loneliness."

Wolfe, Thomas on loneliness
6 fans of this quote   

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

Wolfe, Thomas on art   

"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."

Wolfe, Thomas on art   

"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."

Wolfe, Thomas on spirituality   

"If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has talent and uses only half of it, he has half failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know."

Wolfe, Thomas on success   

"The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever -- in short, to be the bohemian."

Wolfe, Thomas on bohemia   

"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it."

Wolfe, Thomas on books - reading
8 fans of this quote   

"We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past."

Wolfe, Thomas on time   

"One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years."

Wolfe, Thomas on life   

"There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves."

Wolfe, Thomas on cooking
3 fans of this quote   

"Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores."

Wolfe, Thomas on criticism   

"A cult is a religion with no political power."

Wolfe, Thomas on cult   

"Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs."

Wolfe, Thomas on culture   

"He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never."

Wolfe, Thomas on anger