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
-
I actually found not having a routine was inspiration.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.
-
As Peter Bogdanovich would say of Paper Moon: Ryan's wonderful in it, and he sat there and watched the kid steal the picture.
-
You don't wear all your jewellery at once. You're much more believable if you talk in your own voice.
-
We're seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one, and that terrifies Washington, D.C.
-
There's a lot of whiners in every crowd.
-
I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The Government as Substitute Husband did for women what labor unions still have not accomplished for men. And men pay dues for labor unions; the taxpayer pays the dues for feminism. Feminism and government soon become taxpayer-supported women’s unions.
-
Ride-sharing is one of the biggest math problems that's ever been approached, that's ever been attempted to be solved.
-
And that is also what the movie's about, going beyond success, what is success 'cause I think success is misperceived as just a cake and it isn't. There is many things inside that success. There's a maturity and a heartbreak and sadness and broken glass.
-
The true art of being young is knowing how to defy gravity and upset as many people as possible while doing it. How to penetrate the great secrets of the universe and damn the torpedoes. How to stir the demons of our destiny.
-
Like most women, I always dreamed of becoming a mother.
-
I get those fleeting, beautiful moments of inner peace and stillness - and then the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day, I'm a human trying to make it through in this world.
-
I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
