"I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems." -- John Hawkes
John Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr. (August 17, 1925 — May 15, 1998), was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.
"As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.""I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.""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.""I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing.""I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.""I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.""I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.""I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.""In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.""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 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.""On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.""Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.""The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.""To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.""When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.""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."
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Thomas Pynchon is said to have admired the novel and thought Hawkes an unmatched stylist. His second novel, The Beetle Leg (1951), an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th century American literature.Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
"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."
