Quote

There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.

Lydia Davis

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Lydia Davis
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 15
Linguist
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Northampton
Massachusetts
Giving
Stop
Trying
Choices
Love
Anyone
Learn
Three
Give
Continuing
Persons
Selfish
Person
Seemed

More quotes by Lydia Davis

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I'm a fierce editor! I don't edit out things that I began by saying, usually. The editing is on the micro level - a comma here, a word there.
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I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.
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That's the interesting thing about writing. You can start late, you can be ignorant of things, and yet, if you work hard and pay attention you can do a good job of it.
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Art is not in some far-off place.
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But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it.
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To be simple, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only she says, and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.
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Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
Lydia Davis
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I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I'm not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.
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I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
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So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.
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Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.
Lydia Davis
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When I'm trying a new form- trying to do something I'm not used to doing, which was true of the novel.
Lydia Davis
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My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
Lydia Davis
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I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.
Lydia Davis
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Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.
Lydia Davis
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I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her the reader may then find the poem difficult.
Lydia Davis
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In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.
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I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
Lydia Davis
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I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.
Lydia Davis
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I don't believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.
Lydia Davis