Harry Mathews Quotes

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I’m not kidding.

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.

I love teaching.

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.

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

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.

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