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

Quotes to Explore
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I actually found not having a routine was inspiration.
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The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law.
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Corporations are the new dictators.
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I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology faculty member, and then I became an administrator of the department, then the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. At the time of the presidential search, I was the dean.
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I've been blessed with pretty strong stamina and healthy genes, so I'd call myself sensible. I've had regular mammograms ever since I found a lump in my breast when I was 30. Thankfully, all was well.
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Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.
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My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.
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I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.
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Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.
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As Peter Bogdanovich would say of Paper Moon: Ryan's wonderful in it, and he sat there and watched the kid steal the picture.
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You don't wear all your jewellery at once. You're much more believable if you talk in your own voice.
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We're seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one, and that terrifies Washington, D.C.
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There's a lot of whiners in every crowd.
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I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.
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Where I am right now I'm pretty good at. You know, I understand that there's a problem. I'm addressing it. I'm doing the work that I have to do.
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Out of the 1.2 billion people in India, one-third of them are between the age of 1-14 and by 2030, India will have a dynamic and youthful workforce of about 700 million with an average age of 35. This is expected to constitute a substantial proportion of world's workforce.
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When we're trying to solve difficult national issues its sometimes necessary to talk to adversaries as well as friends. Historians have a word for this: diplomacy.
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Gertrude Johnson could feel no real respect for, no real interest in, anybody who wasn't a writer. For her there were two species: writers and people; and the writers were really people, and the people weren't.
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Today's ghost stories tend to be much more physically or psychologically violent. The Victorians were much more leisurely about what might or could happen, building suspense layer by layer rather than punching you in the face.
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At my first exhibits, people were saying that's just a light on the wall.
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You cannot play naive if you're not.
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Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.
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I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.