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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.

Thomas Pynchon

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Thomas Pynchon
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 8
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Glen Cove
New York
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
Jr.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
Everything
Ignorance
Many
Gets
Writing
Told
Usefully
Think
Trouble
Unaware
Thinking
Stage
Stages
Life
Everybody
Scope
Often
Earlier
Write
Structure

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

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A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
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If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.
Thomas Pynchon
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To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.
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Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.
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But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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Can't say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.
Thomas Pynchon
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This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?
Thomas Pynchon
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I dream that I have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away, And we, so free, Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say.... They took us at the gates of green return, Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why- Do children meet again? Does any trace remain, Along the superhighways of July?
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
Thomas Pynchon
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Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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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.
Thomas Pynchon
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I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.
Thomas Pynchon
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Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role of a gate, or sorting-demon, such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else.
Thomas Pynchon