Harry Mathews quotes

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 get at me - nobody, like the football coach. (Harry Mathews)
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 and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half. View quote
Harry Mathews
And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy. View quote
Harry Mathews
I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches. View quote
Harry Mathews
It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step. View quote
Harry Mathews
I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952. View quote
Harry Mathews
I think situations are more important than plot and character. View quote
Harry Mathews
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 the more said the better. View quote
Harry Mathews
Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am. View quote
Harry Mathews
I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language. View quote
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)
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 I could do with a little training in Paris. View quote
Harry Mathews
What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way. View quote
Harry Mathews
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 whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting. View quote
Harry Mathews
And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't. View quote
Harry Mathews
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. View quote
Harry Mathews
Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence. View quote
Harry Mathews
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding. View quote
Harry Mathews
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest. View quote
Harry Mathews
I love teaching. View quote
Harry Mathews
I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another. (Harry Mathews)
When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city. View quote
Harry Mathews
What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading. View quote
Harry Mathews
Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited. View quote
Harry Mathews
My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done. View quote
Harry Mathews