Top 80 Lydia Davis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become ’better organized.”

— Lydia Davis

2. “The Dog Hair The dog is gone. We miss him. When the doorbell rings, no one barks. When we come home late, there is no one waiting for us. We still find his white hairs here and there around the house and on our clothes. We pick them up. We should throw them away. But they are all we have left of him. We don’t throw them away. We have a wild hope – if only we collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again.”

— Lydia Davis

3. “I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.”

— Lydia Davis

4. “Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning of the novel, as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest. It would have been simpler to begin at the beginning, but the beginning didn’t mean much without what came after, and what came after didn’t mean much without the end.”

— Lydia Davis

5. “Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion – you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.”

— Lydia Davis

6. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

7. “Art is not in some far-off place.”

— Lydia Davis

8. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

9. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating ‘Swann’s Way.’ There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences.”

— Lydia Davis

11. “She can’t say to herself that it is really over, even though anyone else would say it was over, since he has moved to another city, hasn’t been in touch with her in more than a year, and is married to another woman.”

— Lydia Davis

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

— Lydia Davis

13. “No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.”

— Lydia Davis

14. “There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.”

— Lydia Davis

15. “They Take Turns Using a Word They Like “It’s extraordinary,” says one woman.”

— Lydia Davis

16. “Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning of the novel, as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest.”

— Lydia Davis

17. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

18. “Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean.”

— Lydia Davis

19. “I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It’s hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, Alright, I’ll take it, I’ll buy it. That’s what it is.”

— Lydia Davis

20. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

21. “I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university.”

— Lydia Davis

22. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

23. “I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.”

— Lydia Davis

24. “There are also men in the world. Sometimes we forget, and think there are only women – endless hills and plains of unresisting women. We make little jokes and comfort each other and our lives pass quickly. But every now and then, it is true, a man rises unexpectedly in our midst like a pine tree, and looks savagely at us, and sends us hobbling away in great floods to hide in the caves and gullies until he is gone.”

— Lydia Davis

25. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

26. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

27. “I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.”

— Lydia Davis

28. “People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?”

— Lydia Davis

29. “I’m a fierce editor! I don’t edit out things that I began by saying, usually. The editing is on the micro level – a comma here, a word there.”

— Lydia Davis

30. “I think that a certain hunger for him came first and was followed by a feeling of tenderness, gradually increasing, for a person who aroused such hunger and then satisfied it. Maybe that was what I felt for him that I thought was love.”

— Lydia Davis

31. “We only know four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.”

— Lydia Davis

32. “Maybe for now I should try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.”

— Lydia Davis

33. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

34. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

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

— Lydia Davis

Featured in: Fun Quotes

36. “To be simple, I would say a story has to have a bit of narrative, if only “she says,” and then enough of a creation of a different time and place to transport the reader.”

— Lydia Davis

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

37. “Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.”

— Lydia Davis

38. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

39. “I said I would write one letter every day after the mail came. But I did not do that for long. I did not answer most of the letters that came to me. I would plan to walk south in the early part of the afternoon, so as to get a little sun on my face. But I did not do that for long. Although I liked the idea of a rigid order, and seemed to believe that a thing would have more value if it was part of an order, I quickly became tired of the order.”

— Lydia Davis

40. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Lydia Davis

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

42. “This was why she could not sleep. She could not say the day was over. She had no sense that any day was ever over.”

— Lydia Davis

43. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

44. “There was no confusion of our bodies. I knew which arm was his and which mine, and which leg, and which shoulder. I did not lose track and kiss my own arm, or whatever came near my mouth. THe smallest motion did not immediately lead to another motion. It was not endless, I did not go more and more deeply into my body and his body as though to go as far as possible from my mind, and his mind, so conscious, so unrelenting. It did not end while it was still in the middle.”

— Lydia Davis

45. “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.”

— Lydia Davis

46. “She eats her potatoes as though she would make a revolution among them, as though they were the People.”

— Lydia Davis

47. “How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me. And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault.”

— Lydia Davis

48. “I am happy doing the work I do, alone at a desk. That work is a great part of every day. But when I am old and alone all the time, will it be enough to think about the work I used to do?”

— Lydia Davis

49. “Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?”

— Lydia Davis

50. “I would recommend, definitely, developing a ‘day job’ that you like – don’t expect to make money writing!”

— Lydia Davis