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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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Lydia Davis
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 15
Linguist
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Northampton
Massachusetts
Wells
Quantity
Well
Stick
Enough
Sticks
Important
Hour
Intensively
Writing
Starting
Laboriously
Make
Worked
Schedule
Quality
Schedules
Hours
Producing
More quotes by Lydia Davis
Art is not in some far-off place.
Lydia Davis
I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
Lydia Davis
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Lydia Davis
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
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
Lydia Davis
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
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
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.
Lydia Davis
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
I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
Lydia Davis
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
Lydia Davis
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
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
Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.
Lydia Davis