Lydia Davis Quotes
Collections aren't really planned. I just keep writing short pieces until I have enough for a collection.
Quotes to Explore
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I never blamed Pinochet, or my torturers, or external circumstances.
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Is there any more encouraging sign than to see an Indian, who has never been to a university, like our friend Mr. Asutosh Dey here, for example, carrying out original work and finding it recognized by the foremost societies of the world?
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I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people.
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I got drunk when I was five. Everybody gets drunk before they're 21.
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I've been watching 'The Cosby Show' and 'Roseanne' a lot right now, and those work so well because they're not, like, jokey comedies; they are coming from real characters. We want our show to be like that. A family show.
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My job isn't to preach to people, it's to entertain them. I like letting the characters speak for themselves.
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I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.
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Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.
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Archery requires very sensitive muscles.
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I've got a couple of Harleys and a couple of Ducatis.
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My schedule is so crazy.
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All of a sudden I discovered that I'm allergic to caviar. It was the perfect metaphor for my life. When I was only able to afford bad caviar, I could certainly eat my fill of it.
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A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
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I've used a cellphone exactly twice. Things move on. The world changes. And I don't know it.
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Improv as an actor makes you present in the moment. You listen, you're attentive. You're not acting so much as reacting, which is what you're doing in life all the time.
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I have not one shred of anger in my heart against Netanyahu or his wife.
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In the Depression we had to divert corn acreage.
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I love it and really, really enjoy weight training. I love free weights. I find it really rewarding.
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A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
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I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.
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When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.
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The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.
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Collections aren't really planned. I just keep writing short pieces until I have enough for a collection.
