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To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don't know about.
Tom Wolfe
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Writing is a journey of exploration and discovery, even for experienced writers.

In this quote, Tom Wolfe expresses the thrill of writing as an adventure rather than a mere expression of known experiences. He emphasizes the joy found in exploring unknown topics through research and reporting, challenging the conventional advice that writers should only write about what they are familiar with.

Themes

WritingDiscoveryAdventureReportingExploration

In practice

Example use cases

During a writing workshop, to inspire participants about the process of writing.

More from Tom Wolfe

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain's performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can't control, namely, speech.
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And - of course! - the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway.
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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.
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Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So, qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve - of how fast a man is willing to take a curve.
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I have discovered that for me - now, maybe it doesn't work for everybody - for me, it is much more effective to arrive at any situation as a man from Mars than to try to fit in.
Tom WolfeRead
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 WolfeRead

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