Harry Mathews

My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name.

— Harry Mathews

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace…

— Harry Mathews

And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.

— Harry Mathews

There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.

— Harry Mathews

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

— Harry Mathews

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

— Harry Mathews

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I…

— Harry Mathews

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the…

— Harry Mathews

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it;…

— Harry Mathews

“She was disgusted with herself...and the disgust permanently cured her of suicide. Her piddling life did not deserve dramatic remedies.”

— Harry Mathews

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy…

— Harry Mathews

I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

— Harry Mathews

What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.

— Harry Mathews

“Lewis, anything but dull, suffered from an excess of misguided cleverness: he could disparage himself brilliantly in a matter of seconds. He…

— Harry Mathews

I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And…

— Harry Mathews

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an…

— Harry Mathews

Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.

— Harry Mathews

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

— Harry Mathews

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

— Harry Mathews

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the…

— Harry Mathews

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies…

— Harry Mathews

When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.

— Harry Mathews

Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.

— Harry Mathews

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didnt.

— Harry Mathews

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't.

— Harry Mathews