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

- John C. Hawkes

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.

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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.

- John C. Hawkes

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.

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes

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

- John C. Hawkes