Harry Mathews
Harry Mathews
Harry Mathewsis an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. He is also a translator from the French...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth14 February 1930
CountryUnited States of America
american-author disliked half harvard leave princeton spent year
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.
american-author attraction happened initial student visit
I have to say my initial attraction to France, which happened on my first visit when I was a student at eighteen, was inexplicable.
long written long-time
There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.
writing speech transformation
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.
princeton harvard left
I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.
football dream school
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.
dream able france
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.
running thinking vocabulary
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.
writing anxiety way
What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.
writing desire way
Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.
summer spring years
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.