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

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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 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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Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
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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 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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Art is not in some far-off place.
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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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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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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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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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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 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.
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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 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.
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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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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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I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
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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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