Harry Mathews American Author Quotations

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.

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 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.

When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.

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

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.

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.

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.

Since then I've found many other places in the U.S. where I feel absolutely comfortable - most recently, Key West, where I've been very, very happy.

I went to Harvard because I disliked Princeton so much - I spent a year and a half there. I didn't leave Harvard early; I actually finished.

As for characters, I think that very little is needed. You just give a hint and the reader will make up the character on his or her own.

It wasn't anything he said; it was his whole attitude towards literature that made me realize that I could do absolutely anything I wanted to.

I have to say my initial attraction to France, which happened on my first visit when I was a student at eighteen, was inexplicable.

But I soon learned that this was an absolute dead-end street: I would always be an American. And once I realized this, life became a joy.