Thomas Pynchon Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

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