Top 100 Lydia Davis Quotes
#1. There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious - in the abstract, anyway.
Lydia Davis
#2. Idea For A Short Documentary Film
Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.
Lydia Davis
#3. I follow my interests pretty - I don't like the word 'intuitively.' I follow them in a kind of natural way, without questioning them too much.
Lydia Davis
#4. This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over.
Lydia Davis
#5. I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
Lydia Davis
#6. Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.
Lydia Davis
#7. Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.
Lydia Davis
#8. Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.
Lydia Davis
#9. They do sometimes protest...At these times, she sounds authoritative. But she has no authority.
Lydia Davis
#10. I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.
Lydia Davis
#11. All of the little entries in 'The Cows' were written in an irregular way. There might be one or two done one day, and then two weeks might go by or four weeks, and then they were put in an order or sequence.
Lydia Davis
#12. If you think of something, do it.
Plenty of people often think, I'd like to do this, or that.
Lydia Davis
#13. I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
Lydia Davis
#14. The word "fine" is the greatest abbreviation and obviously wrong.
Lydia Davis
#15. Work hard and meticulously. When in trouble, look closely at a text that is a good example of what you're trying to do. And be patient.
Lydia Davis
#16. I copied the address into my address book, erasing an earlier one that had not been good for very long. No address of his was good for very long and the paper in my address book where his address is written is thin and soft from being erased so often.
Lydia Davis
#17. I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.
Lydia Davis
#18. When there were two of you, you decided so many little things together, such as which room to sit in with your morning coffee. When you were alone, he said, it was so miserably difficult to make those little choices.
Lydia Davis
#19. They Take Turns Using a Word They Like "It's extraordinary," says one woman.
Lydia Davis
#20. 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
#21. She was thinking how it was the unfinished business. This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over. Everything was still going on. The business not only not finished but maybe not done well enough.
Lydia Davis
#22. Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:that Scotland has so few trees.
Lydia Davis
#23. I always interrupt work with other work, either in a small way or big way, so that's normal.
Lydia Davis
#24. That night I couldn't sleep at all. Mozart had shown me immortal light, and I now felt as though I were under direct orders from Mozart. He expressed his sadness not only with the minor scale but with the major scale as well.
Lydia Davis
#25. We know we are very special," Davis writes in "Special": "Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?" (from James Wood's review of the FSG "Collected Stories of Lydia Davis")
Lydia Davis
#26. Cat, gray tabby, calm, watches large, black ant. Man, rapt, stands staring at cat and ant. Ant advances along path. Ant halts, baffled. Ant back-tracks fast - straight at cat. Cat, alarmed, backs away. Man, standing, staring, laughs. Ant changes path again. Cat, calm again, watches again.
Lydia Davis
#27. Not a man of habits, though he wished to be,
Lydia Davis
#28. Even though I believe a superlative translation can achieve timelessness, that doesn't mean I think other translators shouldn't attempt other versions. The more the better, in the end.
Lydia Davis
#29. The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person - the translator who, after one, two, or three years of more or less careful work, sees another, and perhaps superior, version appear as if overnight.
Lydia Davis
#30. I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly. Soon they will hide the neighbor and her screaming child.
Lydia Davis
#31. Just as it is hard for us, in our garden, to stop weeding, because there is always another weed there in front of us, it may be hard for her to stop grazing, because there are always a few more shoots of fresh grass just ahead of her.
Lydia Davis
#32. because she couldn't write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm owamn womn
Lydia Davis
#33. A woman has written yet another story that is not interesting, though it has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting.
Lydia Davis
#34. My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
Lydia Davis
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The old vacuum cleaner keeps dying on her
over and over
until at last the cleaning woman
scares it by yelling:
"Motherfucker!
Lydia Davis
#38. The Busy Road
I am so used to it by now
that when the traffic falls silent,
I think a storm is coming.
Lydia Davis
#39. Why don't you like the foods I like?" he asks sometimes. "Why don't you like the foods I make?" I answer.
Lydia Davis
#40. If they finally move, is it because they are warm enough, or is it that they are stiff, or bored?
Lydia Davis
#41. Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the bad ones, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated.
Lydia Davis
#42. The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal--we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience.
Lydia Davis
#43. 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
#44. This dull, difficult novel I have brought with me on my trip - I keep trying to read it. I have gone back to it so many times, each time dreading it and each time finding it no better than the last time, that by now it has become something of an old friend. My old friend the bad novel.
Lydia Davis
#45. 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
#46. His inconsistency. His inability to finish anything. His sudden terrifying feelings that nothing he did mattered. His realizations that what went on in the outside world had more substance than anything in his life.
Lydia Davis
#47. I often pose questions to myself and want the answers. The questions may be psychological or emotional. Or they may involve botany or physiology. I am very curious about strangers I observe - as in a bus line. I am very attached to finding out answers.
Lydia Davis
#48. But at other times, I sit here reading in the afternoon, a myrtle in my buttonhole, and there are such beautiful passages in the book that I think I have become beautiful myself.
Lydia Davis
#49. At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.
Lydia Davis
#50. I first read 'Madame Bovary' in my teens or early twenties.
Lydia Davis
#51. 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
#52. First they burned her - that was last month. Actually just two weeks ago. Now they're starvng him. When he's dead, they'll burn him too.
Oh, how jolly. All this burning of family members in the summertime.
Lydia Davis
#53. 105 years old:
she wouldn't be alive today
even if she hadn't died.
Lydia Davis
#54. Beyond the hand holding this book that I'm reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus - my extra hand.
Lydia Davis
#55. 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
#56. I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.
Lydia Davis
#57. Of course we may have any number of translations of a given text - the more the better, really.
Lydia Davis
#58. For a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone would build a whole city when all that was needed was a room for her.
Lydia Davis
#59. Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?
Lydia Davis
#60. I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
#61. 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
#62. I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.
Lydia Davis
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Collections aren't really planned. I just keep writing short pieces until I have enough for a collection.
Lydia Davis
#66. He says to us: They don't really do anything. Then he adds: But of course there is not a lot for them to do.
Lydia Davis
#67. She found it an interesting exercise to explore a place with a person she did not know well, following not only her own impulses but also his.
Lydia Davis
#68. I would recommend, definitely, developing a 'day job' that you like - don't expect to make money writing!
Lydia Davis
#69. 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
#70. If your eyeballs move, this means that you're thinking, or about to start thinking.
If you don't want to be thinking at this particular moment, try to keep your eyeballs still.
Lydia Davis
#71. Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
Lydia Davis
#72. 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
#73. I think that a certain hunger for him came first and was followed by a feeling of tenderness, gradually increasing, for a person who aroused such hunger and then satisfied it. Maybe that was what I felt for him that I thought was love.
Lydia Davis
#74. She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.
Lydia Davis
#75. I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
Lydia Davis
#76. The translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.
Lydia Davis
#77. I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring.
Lydia Davis
#78. The snow on their faces is so white that how the white patches on their faces, which once looked so white against their black, are a shade of yellow.
Lydia Davis
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc.
Lydia Davis
#83. 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
#84. The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories.
Lydia Davis
#85. If a translation doesn't have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.
Lydia Davis
#86. Color these fish.
Cut them out.
Punch a hole in the top of each fish.
Put a ribbon through all the holes.
Tie these fish together.
Now read what is written on these fish:
Jesus is a friend.
Jesus gathers friends.
I am a friend of Jesus.
Lydia Davis
#87. 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
#88. I think I have a sense right in the beginning of how big an idea it is and how much room it needs, and, almost more importantly, how long it would sustain anybody's interest.
Lydia Davis
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. She can't say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn't been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman.
Lydia Davis
#94. I looked at whale jawbones in the museum this morning. Then I did some shopping. Whenever I go into the drugstore it seems that many people are buying condoms and motion sickness medicine.
Lydia Davis
#95. Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become 'better organized.
Lydia Davis
#96. 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
#97. I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, Alright, I'll take it, I'll buy it. That's what it is.
Lydia Davis
#98. Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean.
Lydia Davis
#99. I do see an interest in writing for Twitter.
Lydia Davis
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top