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 PYNCHONGet too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
More Thomas Pynchon Quotes
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Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.
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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.
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
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Can’t say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.
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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.
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Shall I project a world?
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Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.
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There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.
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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.
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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?
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A screaming comes across the sky.
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My belief is that “recluse” is a code word generated by journalists; meaning, “doesn’t like to talk to reporters.”
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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?
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Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
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What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
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For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.
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I was dreaming about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.
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Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.
THOMAS PYNCHON