Harry Mathews

Born :14 February 1930

American1930

Harry Mathews born on 14th February 1930. As of today 7th May 2025 , we have thoughtfully curated a selection of 26 powerful, inspirational, and motivational quotes - carefully handpicked from an extensive archive of life lessons and timeless wisdom. This legendary quote writer was born in american and went on to share won inspiring words with the world, leaving behind a global legacy that transcends borders.

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Quotes of Harry Mathews

Timeless words and powerful thoughts from Harry Mathews - discover the wisdom, inspiration, and voice behind the quotes that continue to resonate

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

I love teaching.

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

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

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.

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.

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't.

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

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

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

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

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

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.

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