Tom Wolfe Quotes

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.

If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

Write what you know.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

I'm inspired by almost everything I come across in life, and one way or another they find themselves sneaking into my stories.

There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.

The great thing about journalism is that there is so much exposure to all kinds of people who can turn up later as characters, whether you intend it or not.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller more than someone who had something meaningful to say.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.

As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it.

I look for stories everywhere.