Lydia Davis om å slutte å skrive

INTERVIEWER

In the recent story “Writing,” the narrator says, “Life is too serious for me to go on writing.” Do you feel that way? Could you ever stop writing?

DAVIS

I do stop for periods. But I can’t see stopping altogether, just because I enjoy it so much. I have posed myself that question. If you were alone on a desert island and there were no more world and no more people, would you go on writing? Supposing I had the pen and paper, I probably would. 
Like a lot of my stories, that one just followed one momentary thought—What am I doing here, putting odd sentences together and creating some little piece of nonsense, when people are dying on the other side of the world and our government’s going to damnation? It’s something that a lot of ­artists, I’m sure, feel at one time or another, that they’re wasting time or doing something frivolous. So instead of answering myself and ignoring it, I wrote it out as a little thought. I didn’t know how much value to give to that story, but I showed it to a very severe critic and she liked it, so I decided it passed.

Fra The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction no 227