Harry Mathews Quotes

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.

And Then, When I Left Princeton In The Middle Of My Sophomore Year, I Went Into The Navy.

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.

What I Said About John Was That He Liberated Me From My Anxieties About Writing In A Correct, Acceptable Way.

I'd Been Brought Up On The Upper East Side In A Wasp Society, Which Was Death On Crutches.

Write About The Things That Attract You. Choose Your Subjects The Way You Used To Choose Your Toys: Out Of Desire.

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.

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.

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.

Music Had Been My First Love Among The Arts, And I Was Fascinated By It, As I Still Am.