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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
Think
Emotion
Thinking
Language
Use
Difficult
Persons
Saxon
Person
Anglo
Writing
Vocabulary
Would
Academic

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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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Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
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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 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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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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Art is not in some far-off place.
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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 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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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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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 find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
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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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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.
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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 never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words - like 'pois chiches' for chick peas!
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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 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.
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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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