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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   citations 0   J'aime

Thomas Pynchon Citations

Thomas Pynchon: Citations en anglais

“If the U. S. was a person," he later became fond of saying, "and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness”

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Thomas Pynchon livre Against the Day

Source: Against the Day (2006), p. 66

“Here's your quote: "Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!"
Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But wait, there's more!”

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Thomas Pynchon

Playing himself (depicted with a paper bag over his head) on an episode of The Simpsons, "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife".

““I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy. "Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.””

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

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

“You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even a oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such father. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairly tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Seven, Part VII

“You're Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Two, Part I, Schoenmaker

“She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference….”

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

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 4

“Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre V.

Epilogue
V. (1963)

“We simply gow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there her poet chap might have found dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus.”

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Thomas Pynchon livre V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Nine, Part II, Godolphin

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

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Thomas Pynchon livre Against the Day

Source: Against the Day (2006), p. 622

“What, a Re-Peat!”

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Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

Source: Mason & Dixon (1997), Chapter 74

“Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish!”

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Thomas Pynchon livre Inherent Vice

Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won't be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it...
Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 119

“They are in love. Fuck the war.”

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

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals.”

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

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

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