Literary Birthday – 15 July – Lydia Davis

Happy Birthday, Lydia Davis, born on 15 July 1947.

Lydia Davis Quotes

1. Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it’s a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.
2. Work hard and meticulously. When in trouble, look closely at a text that is a good example of what you’re trying to do. And be patient.
3. Art is not in some far-off place.
4. I don’t feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.
5. 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.
6. My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
7. To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing.
8. 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.
9. That’s the interesting thing about writing. You can start late, you can be ignorant of things, and yet, if you work hard and pay attention you can do a good job of it.
10. I don’t believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn’t use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer’s characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.

Source for quotes: The New Yorker and A-Z

Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, and translator. She is known for her idiosyncratic and extremely short stories often characterised by vivid observations of everyday, routine events. She is the author of six collections of short stories, including Can’t and Won’t (2014) and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009); one novel, The End of the Story (1995); and a collection of nonfiction, Essays One (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance (2007) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her honours and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Man Booker International Prize. She is a professor emerita at SUNY Albany. In 1974, Davis married the late author Paul Auster. They later divorced.

Source for photograph: kellywritershouse, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lydia_Davis_at_Kelly_Writers_House_(cropped).jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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