Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Pynchon

I have this guitar on which I occasionally kill time making up rock n' roll lyrics.

Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right: you can never have too much.

We have recently moved into an era when... everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information just by stroking a few keys on a terminal.

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

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

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!

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

She would give them order. She would create constellations.

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

Idealism is no good. Any concrete dedication to an abstract condition results in unpleasant things like wars.

'Recluse' is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.'

A screaming comes across the sky.

Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.

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

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

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

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

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

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

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.

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

The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.

If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

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

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

Length is usually intensity. Not time.

Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

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

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.

But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn't felt it go away, as if he'd known the best moment to let go.

There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.

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

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

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

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

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

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.

What’s this? What are the antagonists doing here – infiltrating their own audience? Well, they’re not really. It’s somebody else’s audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of the darkside hours of life of the rocket capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also.

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.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.

Why should things be easy to understand?

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.

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

She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.

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

Perhaps its familiarity rendered it temporarily invisible to you.

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

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

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

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.

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