Thomas Pynchon Quotes

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.

Why should things be easy to understand?

Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.

A screaming comes across the sky.

The Lord's angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord's Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.

Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.

Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all--hahhhh.

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.

Length is usually intensity. Not time.

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

this is america, you live in it, you let it happen. let it unfurl.

What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it.

My belief is that "recluse" is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, "doesn't like to talk to reporters."

The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.

She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.

Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But wait, there's more!

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments

Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.

Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

Can't say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.

For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

Shall I project a world?

[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.