Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.

If you give in to the threat of violence, if you give in to bullying, what you know is that there will be more bullying. There will not be less bullying. If you appease the bully, you make sure that he will bully you some more. Not less. It doesn't solve the problem. It makes the problem worse.

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.

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

So Thomas Pynchon wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option).