Thomas Pynchon Quotes

Obviously the idea of being human is a very human idea.

The true artform is being a human being.

It's really about connecting to your own humanity and your own behaviors, and getting to a level of self-awareness so that you can have perspective and step outside of yourself and transform and become another person.

Everything human is alien to me.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.

Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.

If you are not astonished that you exist, your humanity is not complete.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.

I think and that is all that I am.

I write human stories. I write about people. Not as a product of their environment. But from the stance that everybody is made of the same thing.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.

One of my problems is to find the self.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

The man I am will always raise a protest against the man I wanted to be and the two will live together to the end, but the man I wanted to be will be the one on whom judgement will be passed.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

One day I actually took the list into the bathroom and I put it up against my face and looked in the mirror and I realized I had one of two choices, change the list or change myself.

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.

… one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.