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Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

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
Remote
Cute
Page
Pages
Characters
Dies
Character
Conceptual

More quotes by 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, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.
Thomas Pynchon
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All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.
Thomas Pynchon
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Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.
Thomas Pynchon
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[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.
Thomas Pynchon
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Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
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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There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.
Thomas Pynchon
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In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.
Thomas Pynchon
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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?
Thomas Pynchon
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Shall I project a world?
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
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All variables are independent.
Thomas Pynchon
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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!
Thomas Pynchon
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Length is usually intensity. Not time.
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.
Thomas Pynchon
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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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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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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon
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A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.
Thomas Pynchon