…the world we see Dorothy living in at the beginning of the picture is black, actually brown, and white, only she thinks she’s seeing it all in color - the same normal everyday color we see our lives in. Then the cyclone picks her up, dumps her in Munchkin Land, and she walks out the door, and suddenly we see the brown and white shift into Technicolor. But if that’s what we see, what’s happening with Dorothy? What’s her “normal” Kansas color changing into? Huh? What very weird hypercolor? as far beyond our everyday color as Technicolor is beyond black and white…

— Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

The world had just been disassembled, anybody here could be working any hustle you could think of, and it was long past time to be, as Shaggy would say, like, gettin out of here, Scoob.

— Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

How could this be? Unless, sure, time travel of course…some CIA engraver, in some top-security workshop far away, was busy right now copying this image off his own screen and then would later somehow go slip his copy into a covert special mailbox, which would have to be located close to a power-company substation so they could bootleg the power they needed, raising everybody else’s rates, to send information time-traveling back into the past, in fact there might even be time-warp insurance you could buy in case these messages went astray among the unknown energy surges out there in the vastness of Time…

— 

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

The entire passage is such classic Pynchon that it almost borders on parody, saturated with hazy conspiracy theories and distrust of authority. The best part though is the phrase “covert special mailbox”, which may or may not be a sly reference to the secret underground postal system that may or may not exist in his novel The Crying of Lot 49. Which was called W.A.S.T.E. by the way, which is where Radiohead got the name for their online store. Pynchon’s one of the few “serious” authors you could imagine possibly doing things like that, scattering little jokey references to his previous work here and there. I mean, just imagine if Salinger writes another novel and in it has a character reference meeting “some annoying young man, always going on and on about some girl and her checkers strategy.” Ridiculous, right? But in Pynchon, since his favorite thing seems to be piling confusions upon confusions, there never really is the possibility of calling one particular thing ridiculous.

On certain days, driving into Santa Monica was like having hallucinations without going through all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, for sure, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica.

— Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice