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“There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Long
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Writing #Speech #Transformation
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Children #Years #Europe
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“I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Harvard #Princeton
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“I think situations are more important than plot and character.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Character #Thinking #Important
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Football #Dream #School
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Virginia #Norfolk #Said
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“Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Art #First Love #Firsts
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Dream #Able #France
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“And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didnt.”
-- Harry Mathews
#College #Parent #Upset
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Running #Thinking #Vocabulary
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Play #Ideas #Paris
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“I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Easter #Upper East Side #Sides
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“What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Writing #Anxiety #Way
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Writing #Desire #Way
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“You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Giving Up #Giving
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Children #Home #Boys
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Summer #Spring #Years
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“And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Years #Navy #Sophomore
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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.”
-- Harry Mathews
#Opportunity #Interesting #May
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