A Quote by Lydia Davis

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

Lydia Davis

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Closer Least Little Narrative Often Poems Sometimes Stories Them

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Lydia Davis
American - Novelist
Born: July 15, 1947

I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

Ron Rash

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Robert Morgan

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

Charles de Lint

My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

Anna Journey

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

Shane McCrae

I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about.

James Arthur

Narrative nonfiction was not my forte. I always wanted to let my imagination run free, and the facts sometimes got in the way. At one point I wanted to illustrate Jack Prelutsky's enchanting poems. Unable to do that, I started devising and improvising my own poems, very raw at first. I immersed myself in verse, writing reams of stuff until it gelled.

Douglas Florian

I'm obsessed with this idea of storytellers and people who have a narrative, and sometimes sustain a relationship because they're telling a narrative and someone is listening to that. Often the nature of the relationship is determined by how well they tell the story, or someone else's ability to suspend disbelief, or infuse into their narrative something which they may not even be aware of.

Atom Egoyan

I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense.

Matthea Harvey

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth. Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.

Alan Moore

I want there to be hints of narrative everywhere in the image so that people can make up their own stories about them. But I don't want to have my own narrative and force it on to them.

Cindy Sherman

I don't think all poems need to be written in conversational language - those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.

Matthea Harvey

I wrote my sonic meditations and started using them with students. I took a bunch of UCSD students out to Joshua Tree and we did the sonic meditations on the boulders.

Pauline Oliveros

A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If what the mouth utters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that the meditations are the same. But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become the meditations of the heart, and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.

Richard Mitchell

When I decided to make my version of Poe's stories, I wanted to respect the original material or to at least get closer to what his stories are really about. Most other adaptations I've seen sort of follow the story but they never satisfy me as an audience member or as a reader.

Raul Garcia

I don't have a twin, but I do have a brother and sisters, and I do know that there is a special bond there that is - I'm going to say - closer. It's different. It's closer than having a best friend. It's easier to forgive them. I think it's also easier to get mad at them. You feel a little piece of yourself in them.

Justin Hartley

A Quote by Lydia Davis

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