47 Quotes by Harry Mathews

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.

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.

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.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.

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.