Harry Mathews

“My rule is: If I can’t tell it to my mother, I can’t put it in a book.”

“The main thing is to have a framework... and then to find the freedom inside that framework.”

“Happiness is the absorption in some occupation which satisfies all one's faculties.”

“Translation is a very good way of getting close to a text.”

“The problem isn't to learn the rules, it's to learn the game.”

“You use a formal system to generate a text which you would not have been able to generate otherwise.”

“A story is an operation to be performed, and you can't do it in a sloppy way.”

“It's always the same story: we are what we are, and we're not what we would like to be.”

“I'm interested in the way that we create realities.”

“All my books are about the same thing: the search for a home.”

“Pleasure is a sensation of joy that is satisfied with its own pointless perfection.”

“I think that writing should be a discovery... I think it should be an exploration.”

“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.”

“I have no imagination. I can't imagine anything.”

“Life itself is a process of translation.”

“The point is to try to be as rigorous as you can.”