"In Travesty I hoped to write a comic novel about the fatal importance of the imagination."

"It's impossible for me to think of fiction without a moral center. My work is an effort to expose the worst in us all, to cause us to face up to the enormities of our terrible potential for betrayal, disgrace, and criminal behavior."

His interests are: "idealism, innocence, and luminous, murderous impulse."

"Detachment is at the center of the novelist's experiment."

"My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they're elaborately structured."

Defining structure as "verbal and psychological coherence," he unifies his novels and advances the tale not by the mechanics of the plot but by "recurring image and recurring action."

All human beings are "poor, forked, and corruptible."

"The success of the effort depends on the degree and quality of consciousness that can be brought to bear on fully liberated materials of the unconscious."

"I'm not interested in reflection or representation; I'm only interested in creating a fictive world. The writing of each fiction is a taking of a psychic journey."

"Everything is dangerous, everything is tentative, nothing is certain."

"I want my fiction to destroy conventional morality and conventional attitudes."

"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme."

He is interested in "the primacy of the imagination, not in esoteric indulgence or in the writer as public figure. And I dislike autobiographical fiction. I don't write fiction in order to use my life up as its source. The problem is that people don't know that life is a kind of fiction that we create and we accept as 'real.' We need to challenge such realities all the time."

For Hawkes, realism in fiction after 1945 means "pedestrian" thinking and pedestrian technique.