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"What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way."
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"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."

"A true piece of writing sets you free."

"A writer travels through the heart again and again to express the beauty of its contents."

"The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book."

"I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten days you'll have written six stories! I don't understand it. I'm like one of those old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop."
Explore more quotes by Harry Mathews

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

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

"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."

"I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing."

"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."

"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."

"And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy."
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