Top 100 Quotes About Pynchon
#1. So Thomas Pynchon wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option).
Salman Rushdie
#2. I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.
Leslie Fiedler
#3. Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published 'V.' The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon.
Paul Di Filippo
#4. 'Pastoralia' by George Saunders. Possibly my favorite book. It's one of the weirdest books I've ever read. If Monty Python and Thomas Pynchon had a love child, and it was raised by Frank Zappa on a weird commune, that would be this book.
Libba Bray
#5. I'm a white guy listening to the Cure and thinking about Pynchon influences.
Shane Warren Jones
#6. I like Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels - Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig - invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn't do the job they had in mind.
William Zinsser
#7. Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.
Salman Rushdie
#8. Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest?
L.L. Barkat
#9. I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take ... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
Paul Auster
#10. Emo means different things to different people. Actually, that's a massive understatement. Emo seems solely to mean different things to different people - Like pig latin or books by Thomas Pynchon, confusion is one of its hallmark traits.
Andy Greenwald
#11. I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.
John Larroquette
#12. John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
M.H. Abrams
#13. I can be really silly when I'm not actually writing silliness, and I have to rein that in. Pynchon, in my opinion, sometimes tells elaborate shaggy dog stories just to work up to a pun or punch line. My challenge is to use humor and wordplay to reinforce the emotional core of the novel.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#14. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.
Thomas Pynchon
#15. The past, hey no shit, it's an open invitation to wine abuse.
Thomas Pynchon
#16. Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message ... .
Thomas Pynchon
#18. Poetry is not communication with angels or with the "subconscious." It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more.
Thomas Pynchon
#20. For many people laughing is a way of being loud without having to say a thing.
Thomas Pynchon
#21. Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some
Thomas Pynchon
#22. It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.
Thomas Pynchon
#23. And over my head," relates Squire Haligast, "it form'd an E-clipse, an emptiness in the Sky, with a Cloud-shap'd Line drawn all about it, wherein words might appear, and it read, - 'No King . . .
Thomas Pynchon
#24. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.
Thomas Pynchon
#25. You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm.
Thomas Pynchon
#26. Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn't expect?
Thomas Pynchon
#27. I used to worry about you, Zoyd, but I see I can rest easy now the Vaseline of youth has been cleared from your life's lens by the mild detergent solution of time, in its passing. . .
Thomas Pynchon
#28. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
Thomas Pynchon
#29. All this home-computer gaming, Nintendo 64, PlayStation, now this Xbox thing, maybe I just want the boys to see what blowing aliens away was like in the olden days.
Thomas Pynchon
#31. My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters ...
Thomas Pynchon
#32. Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
Thomas Pynchon
#33. Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do
Thomas Pynchon
#34. The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel."
"Awesome."
"Maybe, but it's code's all it is.
Thomas Pynchon
#35. 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.
Thomas Pynchon
#37. Where may one breathe?" demands one Continental Macaroni, in a yellow waistcoat, " - in New-York, Taverns have rooms where Smoke is prohibited." "Tho' clearly," replies the itinerant Stove-Salesman Mr. Whitpot, drawing vigorously at his Pipe, "what's needed is a No-Idiots Area.
Thomas Pynchon
#38. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.
Thomas Pynchon
#39. It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.
Thomas Pynchon
#41. Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word.
Thomas Pynchon
#42. She has assisted at more than one Birth, has endur'd a hard-drinking and quarrelsome troop of Men-Folk, - who is this unfamily'd man in a Frock to call her child?
Thomas Pynchon
#44. I mean only that in our Times, 'tis not a rare Dispute," Maskelyne assures him. "Reason, or any Vocation to it,
the Pursuit of the Sciences,
these are the hope of the Young, the new Music their Families cannot follow, occasionally not even listen to.
Thomas Pynchon
#45. Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.
Thomas Pynchon
#46. You never want to see kids repeat your own mistakes.
Thomas Pynchon
#47. Here was world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of life and deaths ...
Thomas Pynchon
#48. Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?
Thomas Pynchon
#49. Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurancers, Peddlers upon the global Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks, - these are the last poor fallen and feckless inheritors of a knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed.
Thomas Pynchon
#50. Don't commit original sin. Try and let her just be.
Thomas Pynchon
#51. Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate. But they did not prosper ... about all they did was persist
Thomas Pynchon
#52. Just don't tell me you're in love, OK?"
"Sister, I ain't even in line.
Thomas Pynchon
#53. What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.
Thomas Pynchon
#54. To those of us who survived [ ... ], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.
Thomas Pynchon
#55. Down the toilet, lookit me,
What a silly thing ta do!
Hope nobody takes a pee,
Yippy dippy dippy doo ...
Thomas Pynchon
#56. 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.
Thomas Pynchon
#57. For about ten minutes the vengeful crew proceed to maim, strangle, poison, burn, stomp, blind and otherwise have at Pasquale, while he describes intimately his varied sensations for our enjoyment.
Thomas Pynchon
#58. But don't they look like apes, now, fighting over a female? Even if the female is named Liberty.
Thomas Pynchon
#59. How, Yusef wondered, can two men joke like that and tomorrow be enemies. Perhaps they'd been enemies yesterday. He decided public servants weren't human.
Thomas Pynchon
#60. Fuck you," whispers Slothrop. It's the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that.
Thomas Pynchon
#61. But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm.
Thomas Pynchon
#62. That night she sat for hours, too numb to even drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vaccum. For this, oh God, was the void.
Thomas Pynchon
#63. Death is a debt to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you.
Thomas Pynchon
#64. The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
Thomas Pynchon
#65. Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs
what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?
Thomas Pynchon
#66. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is.
Thomas Pynchon
#67. Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen.
Thomas Pynchon
#68. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light
Thomas Pynchon
#69. Mason glowers, shaking his head. I've ascended, descended, even condescended, and the List's not ended, - but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing, thankee.
Thomas Pynchon
#70. Some would say eccentric. I would say stoned out of his fuckin mind, nothing personal.
Thomas Pynchon
#71. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work.
Thomas Pynchon
#72. You came to talk about the play," he said. "Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare." "Who was he?" she said. "Who was Shakespeare? It was a long time ago.
Thomas Pynchon
#73. Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.
Thomas Pynchon
#74. Last apricot light flooded landward and brought their shadows uphill, past the lifeguard towers, into terraces of bougainvillea, rhododendrons, and ice plant.
Thomas Pynchon
#75. Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance.
Thomas Pynchon
#76. (On the book "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me") Coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch. Hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time.
Thomas Pynchon
#77. Man, I want to die, is all," cried Ploy.
"Don't you know," said Dahoud, "that life is the most precious possession you have?
Thomas Pynchon
#78. Anyone who wonders what Imps look like in their Middle Years would be perhaps more than satisfied with Shelby's Phiz at the moment, - Malice undiminish'd, with a Daily Schedule that leaves him too little time to express it.
Thomas Pynchon
#79. A schlemihl is a schlemihl. What can you "make" out of one? What can one make out of himself? You reach a point, and Profane knew he had reached it, where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again he got attacks of acute optimism.
Thomas Pynchon
#80. I haven't sold my soul yet - well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there,
Thomas Pynchon
#81. Philosophick Work, to proceed at all smartly, wouldn't you agree, requires a controll'd working-space.
Thomas Pynchon
#82. Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem ...
Thomas Pynchon
#83. But there I was, surrendering to a most extraordinary call from the grave, the mass-grave-to-be of Europe, as if somewhere ahead lay an iron gateway, slightly ajar, leading to a low and sombre country, with an incalculable crowd on sides eager to pass into it, and bearing me along.
Thomas Pynchon
#84. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.
Thomas Pynchon
#85. No language meant no chance of co-opting them in to what their round and flaxen invaders were calling Salvation.
Thomas Pynchon
#86. In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?
Thomas Pynchon
#87. They lived for different futures, but they were each other's unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.
Thomas Pynchon
#88. Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.
Thomas Pynchon
#89. Yet after night fall most any layover here, it seemed that they ended up cruising the bleak arterials of dismal L.A. backwaters, seeking out of some helpless fatality the company of lowlifes of opportunity.
Thomas Pynchon
#90. People in this town saw only what they'd all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free.
Thomas Pynchon
#91. One minute you're gettin a nice blow job, the next it's like fuckin Vietnam, assault teams everyplace you look, scuba units climbin out of the Jacuzzi, chicks runnin around screaming. . . .
Thomas Pynchon
#92. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mugs shots of the bought and sold?
Thomas Pynchon
#93. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager's own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that.
Thomas Pynchon
#94. So claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats.
Thomas Pynchon
#95. [Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
Thomas Pynchon
#96. Dealing with the Hippie is generally straightforward. His childlike nature will usually respond positively to drugs, sex, and/or rock and roll, although in which order these are to be deployed must depend on conditions specific to the moment.
Thomas Pynchon
#97. She couldn't stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn't.
Thomas Pynchon
#98. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country's fate.
Thomas Pynchon
#99. A pocket full of spare change and anger unlimited, what more does a 30-year-old innocent need to make his way in the city?
Thomas Pynchon
#100. What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?
Thomas Pynchon
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