Essays One Quotes

“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, Essays One

“I want to remember exactly what she said, but someone reading this does not mind if it is not exact: Please, says that someone, just choose one or the other and get on with the story. Give me fiction, if you have to—the approximation. Not the truth, along with your doubt.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“When you think you will not remember something, you write it down, either in a notebook or on a handy piece of paper. You have many pieces of paper all over the house and in all sorts of pockets and bags with things written on them that you either don’t remember or do, also, remember—either do not have in your mind also or do have in your mind also. So the pieces of paper with writing on them supplement the living tissue of your memory, as though your usable, active memory goes beyond the bounds of your head out onto these pieces of paper.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“He objected to the barbarity of the Old Testament and questioned the authenticity of the New Testament. He said that “if Christ had meant to establish a new religion, he would have written it down himself.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“Was I, in fact, afraid of the present age, and was I even glad, rather than merely surprised, that the glaciers might return?”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“Free yourself of your device, for at least certain hours of the day—or at the very least one hour. Learn to be alone, all alone, without people and without a device that is turned on. Learn to experience the purity of that kind of concentration. Develop focus, learn to focus intently on one thing, uninterrupted, for a long time.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“If you want to be original, don’t labor to be original. Rather, work on yourself, your mind, and then say what you think. This was Stendhal’s advice. Actually, he said: “If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“Much more recently I was analyzing the humor of the British novelist Barbara Pym, a writer I enjoy: I would start at the beginning of a chapter and proceed, again, one sentence at a time. She was not funny, not yet, she was rather neutral, and then—aha, there it was, the first funny moment. And then I would ask, How does she do it?”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“Our lives are in chronological order, if no other kind of order.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“Of course, any book, and any piece of writing, is already part of a cooperative. It is, in itself as printed on the page, incomplete. It requires a reader to complete it. But the reader may also misunderstand it, distort it in favor of another idea, forget large parts of it, misremember it, create something different in misremembering it, etc. All these responses are perfectly legitimate parts of the cooperative act.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“For one thing, it is hard for me to let a sentence stand if I see something wrong with it. Even when I’m writing a grocery list it is hard for me not to correct a misspelling.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“I would have to go back and do some studying to talk properly about the characteristics of Old English poetry—that is, poetry written in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, between the seventh century and a few decades after the Norman Conquest of England, which occurred in 1066. (This date is one that should be remembered especially by writers in English, because it is after this date that the French language was aggressively introduced into the existing languages of England; the Norman Conquest resulted in our having the wonderful doubled vocabulary that we have in English:”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“Order is very important, order in a list of any kind. You may have the elements you want in a list, within a sentence, but in an order that is arbitrary or a bit jumbled. The reader receives the content that you have offered, but doesn’t receive it in the best possible order, in an order that falls neatly into place in his or her mind: click, click, click.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“But in the case of the novel by Perec, who has no fewer than four e’s in his own name, the deliberate elimination of the e was perhaps not just a conceptual antic but had an emotional source and an emotional effect.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“The sight of the poultry seemed to make him listless.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One