John Hawkes Quotes

It`s hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they`re all the same, I`m convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.

My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

I didn`t for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I`m not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

My education was constantly interrupted. I moved around a great deal, had no real sense of home, except for the New England landscape.

To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.

Because of my father`s dislocated life, I knew intuitively that I wanted to have as few jobs as possible by the time I was married.

I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.

In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.

I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that`s where I commented someplace on hearing.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

Really, I didn`t like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.

I didn`t know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

As he was telling us about these pleasures, at that very moment, in the ruin and the tall grass, I stepped on a hornets, nest and got stung.

Once I started to write prose, I certainly did not envy the poets. I`ve mocked poets and poetry ever since I began writing fiction.

In my earliest childhood, we seemed to move back and forth between New York City and Connecticut until I was about eight or ten years old.

I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.

The earliest memory in Connecticut that I can think of has to do with a riding stable that abutted against the property of my grandfather.

I`m only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

My father`s parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

He was the first person to befriend me at Harvard. At any rate, in some class the teacher gave us an exercise which I`ve used ever since.