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.

Harry Mathews

I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

Harry Mathews

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

Harry Mathews

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

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

Harry Mathews

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

Harry Mathews

Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

Harry Mathews

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

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.

Harry Mathews

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

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews

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.

Harry Mathews