Literary Birthday – 8 May – Thomas Pynchon

Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon, born 8 May 1937.

Thomas Pynchon Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Why should things be easy to understand?
4. Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.
5. 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.
6. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.
7. 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 is an American literary novelist. His called a recluse and is seldom interviewed or photographed. He is well known for Gravity’s Rainbow, which won the National Book Award for Fiction. He is known to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Pynchon,_high_school_yearbook_editor,_1953.jpg

English: Photo presumably taken by “Mr. DiLillo”, who was identified as staff photographer of The Oysterette (Mead 1989, p. 170)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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