Lydia Davis Quotes

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.

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

I don’t feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it’s a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.

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.

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.

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.

I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words – like ‘pois chiches’ for chick peas!

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.

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.

I find teaching – I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.

I attempt all day, at work, not to think about what lies ahead, but this costs me so much effort that there is nothing left for my work. I handle telephone calls so badly that after a while the switchboard operator refuses to connect me. So I had better say to myself, Go ahead and polish the silverware beautifully, then lay it out ready on the sideboard and be done with it. Because I polish it in my mind all day long—this is what torments me (and doesn’t clean the silver).