Tom Wolfe, as famous for his distinctive attire as for his bracing fiction, once explained why he had begun to wear his trademark hand-tailored three piece white suits (worn with a hat and umbrella): "I had a white suit made in 1960, started wearing it in January -- and found it annoyed people tremendously."

["It's kind of a harmless form of aggression, I guess."]

[Number of exclamation points in Wolfe's blockbuster bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities? 2,343.]