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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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Lydia Davis
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 15
Linguist
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Northampton
Massachusetts
Use
Difficult
Persons
Saxon
Person
Anglo
Writing
Vocabulary
Would
Academic
Think
Emotion
Thinking
Language

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I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
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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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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.
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I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
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My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
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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 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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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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So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.
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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.
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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 am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
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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.
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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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I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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