Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents. — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name. — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody… — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy. — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later. — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done. — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches. — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to… — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between… — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was… — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
“She was disgusted with herself...and the disgust permanently cured her of suicide. Her piddling life did not deserve dramatic remedies.” — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France… — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old. — Harry Mathews Copy Share Image
