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
Persons
Selfish
Person
Seemed
Giving
Stop
Trying
Choices
Love
Anyone
Learn
Three
Give
Continuing

More quotes by Lydia Davis

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I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
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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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I'm used to rereading e-mails, even, before sending them - a bit compulsive. So this is high speed roller coaster for me!
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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.
Lydia Davis
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The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.
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.
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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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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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The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all.
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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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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.
Lydia Davis
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I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
Lydia Davis
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Art is not in some far-off place.
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.
Lydia Davis
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I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words - like 'pois chiches' for chick peas!
Lydia Davis
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If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.
Lydia Davis
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I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
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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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I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
Lydia Davis