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I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
Lydia Davis
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Lydia Davis
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 15
Linguist
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Northampton
Massachusetts
Metaphor
Goes
Taught
Writing
Think
Thinking
Metaphors
Mixing
Etc
More quotes by Lydia Davis
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.
Lydia Davis
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.
Lydia Davis
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
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
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
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
Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.
Lydia Davis
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
Art is not in some far-off place.
Lydia Davis
Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
Lydia Davis
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
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
