Oliver Harris Quotes

#1. I was suckered in by the myth of the man [ William Burroughs] as much as by his work.

Oliver Harris

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

Oliver Harris

#3. I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on.
-Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine

Oliver Harris

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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