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No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.
Lydia Davis
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Lydia Davis
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 15
Linguist
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Northampton
Massachusetts
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More quotes by Lydia Davis
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
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
I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.
Lydia Davis
Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.
Lydia Davis
Art is not in some far-off place.
Lydia Davis
As the writer, I may choose to ignore the emotional heart of the matter, and focus on details, and trust that the heart of the matter will be conveyed nevertheless.
Lydia Davis
Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.
Lydia Davis
I'm used to rereading e-mails, even, before sending them - a bit compulsive. So this is high speed roller coaster for me!
Lydia Davis
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.
Lydia Davis
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
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
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.
Lydia Davis
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.
Lydia Davis
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
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
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
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
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
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
Lydia Davis
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