1931-, American Author, Journalist
A cult is a religion with no political power.
Thomas Wolfe – [Cult]
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
Thomas Wolfe – [Liberals]
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Thomas Wolfe – [Culture]
Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
Thomas Wolfe – [Death and Dying]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Success]
Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
Thomas Wolfe – [Life and Living]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Leaders and Leadership]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Architecture]
Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
Thomas Wolfe – [Army and Navy]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Critics and Criticism]
One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
Thomas Wolfe – [Cities and City Life]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Bohemia]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Arts and Artists]
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Thomas Wolfe – [Books and Reading]
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
Thomas Wolfe – [Loneliness]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Spirit and Spirituality]
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
Thomas Wolfe – [Cooking]
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
Thomas Wolfe – [Arts and Artists]
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.
Thomas Wolfe – [Time and Time Management]