Harry Mathews

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”