Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.

[...] the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...]