John Hawkes (novelist) - Quotations

Quotations

• "For me, everything depends on language."
• "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."
• "Like the poem, the experimental fiction is an exclamation of psychic materials which come to the writer all readily distorted, prefigured in that inner schism between the rational and the absurd."
• "Everything I have written comes out of nightmare, out of the nightmare of war, I think."
• "The writer should always serve as his own angleworm —and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better."