Quote

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

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
Things
Fierce
Editors
Began
Comma
Usually
Micro
Level
Edit
Levels
Edits
Saying
Editor
Word
Editing

More quotes by Lydia Davis

Image
I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
Image
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.
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
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
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
Image
I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
Lydia Davis
Image
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.
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
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
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
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
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
Image
I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
Lydia Davis
Image
The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
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
Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
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
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