Harry Mathews Quotes

30 quotes in 459 categories

• And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.
• After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term…
• It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for…
• You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.
• There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.
• Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.
• Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving…
• What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.
• I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.
• My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna…
• 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…
• I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.
• I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.
• I think situations are more important than plot and character.
• I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which…
• Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.
• I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to…
• My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could…
• When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.
• Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.

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