Harry Mathews Quotes

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

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.

I love teaching.

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

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

Lewis, anything but dull, suffered from an excess of misguided cleverness: he could disparage himself brilliantly in a matter of seconds. He knew literature, art, the theater, history; and his knowledge surpassed what a college normally provides. His knowledge led nowhere, certainly not into the world where he was supposed to earn a living. Lewis had once gone to work in the bookstore of his school because he loved handling books and looked forward to being immersed in them. He was then instructed to keep careful accounts of merchandise that might as well have been canned beans. He soon lost interest in his simple task, failed to master it, and quit after three days. Eight years later, he was still convinced of his practical incompetence. College friends familiar with his tastes would suggest modest ways for him to get started: they knew of jobs as readers in publishing houses, as gofers in theatrical productions, as caretakers at galleries. Lewis rejected them all. While he saw that they might lead to greater things, they sounded both beneath and beyond him--the bookstore again. Other chums who had gone on to graduate school urged their choice on him. Lewis harbored an uneasy scorn for the corporation of scholars, who seemed as unfit for the world as he. He remained desperate, lonely, and spoiled.

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

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

I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.

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.

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.

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

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.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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