If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

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.