Thomas Pynchon

More from Thomas Pynchon

• All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

  Against the Day (2006), p. 622

  • Life & Death
  • Time

• History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history.

  V. (1963), Chapter 9, Part I (Mondaugen)

  • History

• Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed.

  Phone call to CNN, reported in “Where’s Thomas Pynchon?”, CNN (June 5, 1997)

  • Photography

All 7 quotes from Thomas Pynchon

Popular quotes

• No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

  John Donne1572–1631No Man Is an Island (1624), Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Meditation 17In context

• I came, I saw, I conquered.

  Julius Caesar100–44 BCInscription on the triumphal wagon reported in The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, as translated by Robert Graves (1957).

  • Success

• The unexamined life is not worth living.

  Socrates470–399 BCThe Apology of Socrates (399 BC)

  • Philosophy