Love Quote by Harry Mathews

A deceptively gentle confession from a writer best known for formal games and intellectual brinksmanship, this line slips in on the softest of soles: love, fascination, still. Harry Mathews, the Oulipo novelist who made constraint feel like a dare, is often read as an engineer of literature. Here he reminds you that the engine runs on appetite.

“First love among the arts” positions music as origin story, not hobby. It’s the art he learned to feel before he learned to explain. For a writer, that’s a pointed admission: language comes after rhythm. The subtext is that Mathews’s celebrated coolness - his puzzles, procedures, and combinatorial plots - has always had a warmer, older pulse underneath it. Music is his alibi for pleasure.

The phrasing also performs a quiet flex. “Had been…as I still am” stretches fascination across decades, refusing the modern narrative of the artist who outgrows his early influences. Mathews keeps the door open to obsession, which is another way of saying he distrusts maturity as a mask for boredom. The line’s modesty is strategic: it reads like a memoir aside, but it smuggles in an aesthetic manifesto. Music stands for form that doesn’t need paraphrase, structure that can be rigorous without being preachy.

Context matters: Oulipo’s constraints were never meant to sterilize art; they were meant to reintroduce play. By invoking music, Mathews points to the model constraint aspires to - patterns that generate feeling. The sentence is simple because the claim is not: the deepest “literary” thing about him may be the part that wants, first, to listen.