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.

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.

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

Harry Mathews Quotes