138 Quotes by Lydia Davis

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.

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.

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.

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.

I started with small-press publishers, who were willing to publish all sorts of forms. I didn’t move to the larger presses until they knew what they were getting in for.

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.

The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories.

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.

Maybe happy memories can’t involve people who were only strangers or casual friends. You can’t be left alone, in your old age and pain, with memories that include only people who have forgotten you. The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories.