Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.is an American novelist. A MacArthur Fellow, he is noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 March 1937
CityGlen Cove, NY
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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?
Oh, this beer here is cold, cold and hop-bitter, no point coming up for air, gulp, till it's all--hahhhh.
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.
Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.
Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.
Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
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.
It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.
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.
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.
It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem ...
Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.