Lydia Davis: I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to...

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

anecdotes teaching wish

I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring.

Lydia Davis

long-time boring long

I would recommend, definitely, developing a 'day job' that you like - don't expect to make money writing!

Lydia Davis

making-money writing jobs

Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.

Lydia Davis

mind writing sometimes

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

style stories writing

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

pain

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.

Lydia Davis

brain writing two

I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.

Lydia Davis

classroom students teaching

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

writing may believe

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.

Lydia Davis

deployment vocabulary believe

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

abstract principles math

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.

Lydia Davis

emotional focus heart

Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry with me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves me or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.

Lydia Davis

breakup doe want

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

Lydia Davis

allegory reader struggle

I'm used to rereading e-mails, even, before sending them - a bit compulsive. So this is high speed roller coaster for me!

Lydia Davis

rereading speed mail

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

narrative different simple

I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.

Lydia Davis

studying them without first

I see people sometimes who remind me of my narrators.

Lydia Davis

see me sometimes people

I follow my interests pretty - I don't like the word 'intuitively.' I follow them in a kind of natural way, without questioning them too much.

Lydia Davis

follow like too-much way

I think I have a sense right in the beginning of how big an idea it is and how much room it needs, and, almost more importantly, how long it would sustain anybody's interest.

Lydia Davis

beginning big think long

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.