Quotes by Lydia Davis

About Lydia Davis:

Lydia Davis is an American writer noted for her short stories. Davis is also a novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, and has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Proust's Swann’s Way and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Art is not in some far-off place.

Lydia Davis

I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring.

Lydia Davis

I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself...

Lydia Davis

The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it's not the truth an...

Lydia Davis

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

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

I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly. Soon they will hide the neighbor and her screaming child.

Lydia Davis

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart....

Lydia Davis

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

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

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

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 never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words - like 'pois chiches' for chick peas!

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

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

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

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.

Lydia Davis

I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.

Lydia Davis

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameLydia Davis
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornJuly 15, 1947
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionLinguist; Translator; Writer
  • AwardsMan Booker International Prize; Guggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program