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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Lydia Davis

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I worked more intensively hour after hour when I was starting out [writing]. More laboriously. I'd say quantity is important as well as quality, and if you're not producing enough, make a schedule and stick to it.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
Image
Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
Image
I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
Image
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.
Lydia Davis
Image
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