138 Quotes by Lydia Davis

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

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...

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

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

I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption – vain because it is endless – and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.

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.

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.

I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.

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.