Words matter. These are the best Harry Mathews Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.
And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn’t.
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.
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.
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.
My mother could never understand why I didn’t write a thriller, which I’ve finally done.
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I’m not kidding.
I think situations are more important than plot and character.
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.
When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.
And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.
What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.
My Life in CIA is the first time that I’ve ever written a story in my own name.
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.
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.
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 love teaching.
Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.
Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.
