Harry Mathews

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

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

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.

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

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

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.