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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.

Lydia Davis

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Lydia Davis
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 15
Linguist
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Northampton
Massachusetts
Person
Although
Anecdote
Kind
Teaching
Teller
Stage
Anecdotes
Either
Creep
Sort
Fright
Wish
Creeps
Often
Classroom
Persons
Basically

More quotes by Lydia Davis

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I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
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.
Lydia Davis
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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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I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
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.
Lydia Davis
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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.
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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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
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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 feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
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 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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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 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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Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
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
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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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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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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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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