"I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult."
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Quote collection
Lydia Davis quotes (page 3 of 3)
56 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc."
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"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."
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"Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank."
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"I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:that Scotland has so few trees."
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"I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words - like 'pois chiches' for chick peas!"
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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