John C. Hawkes Novelist Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.

I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.

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