Harry Mathews Quotes

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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 readers opportunities to follow it at every step.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

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

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

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

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