Quote

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

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
Characters
Dies
Character
Conceptual
Remote
Cute
Page
Pages

More quotes by Thomas Pynchon

Image
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.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide.
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
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
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
What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it.
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
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.
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
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
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
If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
All variables are independent.
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
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
Image
Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.
Thomas Pynchon
Image
The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
Thomas Pynchon