Lydia Davis Quotes

It's important to be precise about words, because of the thought value of them-they frame and shape so much of the way we understand things.

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

I was born into a profession in which my love of words, chosen with care for their meaning and nuance, was extremely important, not only to me, but also to the people with whom I worked with.

Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.

If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.

Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

I don't like writing - it's so difficult to say what you mean. It's much easier to edit other people's writing and help them say what they mean.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place.

If you need three adjectives to describe something, then you've probably chosen the wrong something.

I want my words to survive translation.

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

I love the right words. I think economy and precision of language are important.

A lot of time, I'd spell things in standard English instead of phonetically because I want people to understand what's going on. It's also very lyrical, and the great thing about lyrical prose is even when you're not totally sure of the words, you can be swayed by the musicality of it.