Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Long
Divided
Think
Parts
Thinking
General
Afraid
Public
Science
Two
Anything

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

Image
Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
The anarchist is dressed all in black. In the dark you can only see his eyes. It dates from the 1930's. Porky Pig is a little boy. The children told me that he has a nephew now, Cicero. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Length is usually intensity. Not time.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
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.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
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
Image
All variables are independent.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
Thomas Pynchon