Thomas Pynchon
There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.Collection: Chance
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right: you can never have too much.
Idealism is no good. Any concrete dedication to an abstract condition results in unpleasant things like wars.
Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
She would give them order. She would create constellations.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
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!
'Recluse' is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters.'
We have recently moved into an era when... everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information just by stroking a few keys on a terminal.
I have this guitar on which I occasionally kill time making up rock n' roll lyrics.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Real
Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.Collection: Remember
Why should things be easy to understand?Collection: Easy
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are ‘yours’ and which are ‘mine.’ It’s past sorting out.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Thinking
Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.Collection: Love You
Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.Collection: World
Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Writing
Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.Collection: Peace
Can't say it often enough — change your hair, change your life.Collection: Hair
She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as ‘pretty’…but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him.Collection: Love
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.Collection: Law
There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.Collection: Spiritual
Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do.Collection: Dream
To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.Collection: Moving
Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.Collection: Greed
You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.Collection: May
A screaming comes across the sky.Collection: Sky
The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.Collection: Lying
I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy." Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.Collection: Poison
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.Collection: Character
this is america, you live in it, you let it happen. let it unfurl.Collection: America
You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.Collection: Miracle
Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.Collection: Dream
Some typewriters in Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could have ever hoped to.Collection: Typewriters
This spiritualist, this statistician, what are you anyway?Collection: Statistician
If America was a person, and it sat down, Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.Collection: America
The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.Collection: Stars
Danger's over, Banana Breakfast is saved.Collection: Breakfast
We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.Collection: Running
In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Children
All variables are independent.Collection: Independent
For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.Collection: Sadness
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?Collection: Dream
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.Collection: Demon