Oliver Harris famous quotes

I am always looking for some clue, some easily missed sign that might just be the missing piece in the puzzle.
-- Oliver Harris

#Missing #Pieces #Might

That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.
-- Oliver Harris

#Letters #Able #Rewriting

A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing.
-- Oliver Harris

#Strong #Glasses #Editing

I like to focus on the varieties of paper, the different sizes and watermarks, evidence perhaps of what was typed when and sometimes where and by whom.
-- Oliver Harris

#Focus #Different #Paper

I have really been fortunate, incredibly privileged, to have done so much editorial work, and I would love to do more. But just as my editions have tried to balance the familiar with the new, the commercial with the scholarly, so too I have to admit that I don't want to do editing for the sake of it, and some possible projects would be of uncertain value to me.
-- Oliver Harris

#Editing #Balance #Would Be

Of course, for me Naked Lunch was the big one, but I still believe I was right to pass on that. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles did an important job with their 2003 "Restored" edition because they knew what they wanted to do, and what they could do. At the time, I simply didn't know. I hadn't even edited Junky back then. So I did the right thing to pass. Instead, what I most want to do now is complete "The Making of Naked Lunch," on which I have been working, on and off, these past 25 years.
-- Oliver Harris

#Jobs #Believe #Past

It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole.
-- Oliver Harris

#Book #Ideas #Insane

I tell this anecdote with tongue in cheek at the start of my book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, but my academic involvement with Burroughs was entirely due to my tutor at Oxford, Peter Conrad. I was discussing with him the idea of staying on to do graduate work and when I tossed the name of Burroughs into the conversation - well, he let it fall loudly onto the floor, and proceeded to cross himself as if warding off an evil spirit. Since I was very ambivalent about an academic career in any case, that decided it for me.
-- Oliver Harris

#Book #Fall #Names

I was suckered in by the myth of the man [ William Burroughs] as much as by his work.
-- Oliver Harris

#Men #He Man #Burroughs

I have discovered the missing link between the anthropoid apes and civilized men. It's us!

I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

The amount of missing girls I've had to trace and their family and their friends always say the same thing. 'She was a bright and affectionate disposition and had no men friends'. That's never true. It's unnatural. Girls ought to have men friends. If not, then there's something wrong about them....

That's what we do on 'Entourage.' We embed ourselves in legitimate authentic moments so wherever the action is happening, we're taking pieces from that red carpet.

Lingerie is one of the most important pieces of your wardrobe. You can have a wardrobe malfunction if you dont choose the right thing to wear underneath!

The day I take either my body or my work for granted will be the day you hear that I've smashed every inch of myself to pieces.

There is no better feeling than when you write something you know is a piece of you and that, at some point, is going to communicate with someone else.

I understood that I might fail, but I wouldn't let it happen because I changed my compass along the way.

The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.