Thomas Pynchon Quotes

There is a twofold meaning in every creature, a literal and a mystical, and the one is but the ground of the other.

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.

A street is a story in asphalt - so it's a paradox that the streets are the one place where the movies play fast and loose with continuity, something to which L.A. streets lend themselves as naturally as does the city's psyche.

If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

East Side, West Side, all around the town

You don’t have to be a paranoid to question the official explanation of things, although it helps …. There will always be more dots to connect.

I have lived in other cities but been inside of only one. I once wore all the windows of Chicago and all its doorways on a key ring. Salons, mansions, alleys, courtrooms, depots, factories, hotels, police cells, the lake front, the rooftops and the sidewalks were my haberdashery.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

For most of my adult life, I drove through Central Park every morning going to work.

I love the streets of Kolkata, and I admire the old architectural buildings.

My favorite elements of 'Start Talkin'' were those man-on-the-street pieces. I love shooting those. I was born in Manhattan, have lived in or around New York my entire life, and I feel like I'm in my element when doing those pieces.

Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.

He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically

It gives one a sudden start in going down a barren, stoney street, to see upon a narrow strip of grass, just within the iron fence, the radiant dandelion, shining in the grass, like a spark dropped from the sun.

I immediately suspected there was much more to it than was being said.

Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.

Art does not reflect what is seen, rather it makes the hidden visible.

An event may be small and insignificant in its origin , and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.

The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman is to be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, be true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.

Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.

Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.

Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.