A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
– Thomas Wolfe
America - It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
– Thomas Wolfe
At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.
– Thomas Wolfe
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
– Thomas Wolfe
Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
– Thomas Wolfe
If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly 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
In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
– Thomas Wolfe
Is not this the true romantic feeling - not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?
– Thomas Wolfe
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
Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.
– Thomas Wolfe
Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
– Thomas Wolfe
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
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe.
– Thomas Wolfe
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
– Thomas Wolfe
Pornography was the great vice of the Seventies; plutography - the graphic depiction of the acts of the rich - the the great vice of the Eighties.
– Thomas Wolfe
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions - Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.
– Thomas Wolfe
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.
– Thomas Wolfe
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
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
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
– Thomas Wolfe
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.
– Thomas Wolfe
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
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.
– Thomas Wolfe
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
This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
– Thomas Wolfe
To a man of sixty... one of the grimmest reminders of the Reaper's approach comes when his doctors, the people who have attended to his body for decades, begin retiring on him... or dying on him... or both.
– Thomas Wolfe
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
We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.
– Thomas Wolfe
What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?
– Thomas Wolfe
You can't go home again.
– Thomas Wolfe
All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
– Thomas Wolfe
One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
– Thomas Wolfe
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
– Thomas Wolfe
Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.