Quotes by Harry Mathews

Quotes 1 till 7 of 7.

• Harry Mathews

  

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  Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints - the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk -we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

• Harry Mathews

  

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  A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him.

• Harry Mathews

  

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  If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.
  Source: Dirk Gently's holistisch detectivebureau (2016) 24

• Harry Mathews

  

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  Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots.

• Harry Mathews

  

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

• Harry Mathews

  

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  There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.

• Harry Mathews

  

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  Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.