2 passages read recently on what makes an artist.

I've been rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word" in Kindle the last couple days, and I ran across a great passage that ...

"Orwell said, 'I never wrote a decent word that wasn't motivated by a deep political feeling.'"

"I totally disagree with Orwell, who I admire," says Tom Wolfe. "I have never written a decent word that was dominated by po...

"What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities."

Writes David Brooks: The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a r...

"Ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety."

Norman Mailer wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The idea of the award is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory...

"This business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush..."

Tom Wolfe on George Bush: Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of "what a fashion liberalism is." A reporter for the N...

Wolfe on Thompson.

Tom Wolfe writes a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, who shared his first-hand research for "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terribl...

The view from Madison.

It's another damp, cool summer day here in Madison. My lewd front-yard mushrooms have re-sprouted. My overgrown hedge is now clipped, b...