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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior, né le 8 mai 1937 à Glen Cove dans l'État de New York, est un écrivain américain connu pour ses œuvres mêlant absurde et érudition.

Originaire de Long Island, il commença des études d'ingénieur à l'université Cornell mais arrêta à la fin de sa deuxième année pour rejoindre l'US Navy dans laquelle il passa deux ans. Il retourna à Cornell en 1957 pour suivre des études de lettres.

Après la publication de quelques nouvelles à la fin des années 1950 et au début des années 1960, il a publié huit romans durant les cinq décennies suivantes qui l'ont rapidement classé parmi les écrivains contemporains les plus commentés : V. , Vente à la criée du lot 49 , L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité , Vineland , Mason & Dixon , Contre-jour , Vice caché et Fonds perdus . Pynchon est aussi connu pour son refus de toute apparition publique : depuis les années 1950, très peu de photographies de son visage ont été publiées, ce qui a alimenté de nombreuses rumeurs, allant jusqu'à remettre en cause la réalité de son identité. Pynchon est ainsi surnommé « l'écrivain anonyme ».

En 1997, peu après la publication de Mason & Dixon, il fut traqué et filmé par CNN. Irrité par cette invasion de sa vie privée, il accepta de donner une interview en échange de la non-diffusion de ces photographies.

Lorsqu'on l'interrogea sur sa nature recluse, il répondit : « Je crois que reclus est un mot de code utilisé par les journalistes et qui signifie qui n'aime pas parler aux reporters ».

Le critique littéraire Harold Bloom a cité Thomas Pynchon comme un des plus grands romanciers américains de son temps, de pair avec Don DeLillo, Philip Roth et Cormac McCarthy. Wikipedia  

✵ 8. mai 1937
Thomas Pynchon: 135 citations0 J'aime

Thomas Pynchon Citations

Thomas Pynchon: Citations en anglais

“Can't say it often enough - change your hair, change your life.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice

“Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre Bleeding Edge

Variante: Paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen
Source: Bleeding Edge (2013), p. 11

“… as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice

“The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that, however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“You can only cruse the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre Inherent Vice

Source: Inherent Vice

“This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

“I want to break out — to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become….”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“"Arrh! Stars and Mud, ever conjugate, a Paradox to consider, — one…for the Astronomer-Royal, perhaps?" His current scheme being, to assail Maskelyne's Sanity, by now and then posing to him Questions that will not bear too much cogitating upon, — most lately, Über Bernouillis Brachistochronsprobleme, 1702 by Baron von Boppdörfer ("Mind like a Spanish Blade. Read it at the Risk of your Self-Esteem.") having almost done the Trick.”

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Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 74

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

“Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“The illustrations were woodcuts, executed with that crude haste to see the finished product that marks the amateur. True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

“Strangely the tumescence began to subside, the flesh at his neck to pale. Any sovereign or broken yo-yo must feel after a short time lying inert, rolling, falling: suddenly to have its hands it cannot escape. Hands it doesn’t want to escape. Know that the simple clockwork of itself has no more need for symptoms of inutility, lonesomeness, directionlessness, because now it has a path marked out for it over which it has no control. That’s what the feeling would be, if there were such things as animate yo-yos.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Eight

“Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence — unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference — something that Kekulé's Serpent had come to — not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of… we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others… we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps — but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given…. ' Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come — who knows?”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“If America was a person, — and it sat down, — Lancaster town would be plunged into a Darkness unbreathable.”

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Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 66

“Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneaker and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre V.

First lines
V. (1963)

“Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“"The edge of evening … the long curve of people all wishing on the first star…. Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep …"
Always remember.
The first star hangs between his feet.
Now”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

““Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5, Mucho Maas

“Have you ever fall'n into one of those Cometary Dazes, with the way the Object grows brighter and brighter each night? These Apparitions in the Sky, we never observe them but in Motion, — gone in seconds, and if they return, we do not see them. Once safely a part of the Night Sky, they may hang there at their Pleasure, performing whatever their Work corresponds to shifting jibs and stay-sails, keeping perfectly upon Station, mimicking any faint, unnam'd Star you please. Do they watch us? Are they visits from the past, from an Age of Faith, when Miracles still literally happen'd?”

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Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 74

“It can get pretty fascist in here…”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“I did not write those letters. This has been a hoax that I've had nothing to do with. I'm sorry it's gone on as long as it has.”

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Thomas Pynchon

On the rumors that he had written a series of letters to a newspaper using the name Wanda Tinasky, in a phone call to CNN (5 June 1997)

“Merle's all-night illumination prolonged itself into an inescapable glow that began to keep him awake.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre Against the Day

Source: Against the Day (2006), p. 65

“For a boy not getting any he had more woman problems than anybody he knew.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre V.

V. (1963)

“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

“You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5

“It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice — guessed and refused to believe — that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children….”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

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