Harry Mathews Quotes
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And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didnt.
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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.
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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.
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I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.
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Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.
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I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.
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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.
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And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.
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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.
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I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.
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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.
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Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.
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You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.
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What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.
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I think situations are more important than plot and character.
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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.
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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.
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Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.
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There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.
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Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.
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