Quote

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

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
People
Knock
Principle
Writers
Principles
Hurt
Feelings
Matter
Like

More quotes by Lydia Davis

Image
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
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
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.
Lydia Davis
Image
Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
Image
Art is not in some far-off place.
Lydia Davis
Image
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
Image
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
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
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
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
I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
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
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
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
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
Image
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
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
Image
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.
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