Harry Mathews

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Life itself is a process of translation.”

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

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