Quote

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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Lydia Davis
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 15
Linguist
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Northampton
Massachusetts
Better
French
Never
English
Like
Seem
Fun
Words
Dream
Peas
Certain
Chick
Seems
Chicks

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Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
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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.
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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 like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.
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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 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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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.
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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 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 am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
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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.
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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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Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.
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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.
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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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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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I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
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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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