Donna Tartt Quotes
"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Work, Writer)
"Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Reality, Right, Succeed)
"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Environment, Literary, Sense, Writer)
"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Time, Projects, Writer)
"On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Business, Lonely, Writers, Writing)
"The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Books, Childhood, First, Now)
"My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Time)
"When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Rain, Water, Writing)
"I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones."
- Donna Tartt
"Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Murder)
"Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Old)
"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Time, Work)
"There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Expectation, Production, Years)
"The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Work, Listening, Practice, Reading, Style)
"The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Ideas, Consequences, Learning, Students)
"The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Friend, First, Language)
"You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Experience, Richness, Weight, Years)
"The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Job)
"Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Time, Children, Observation)
"But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Life, Vision, Romantic, Ugly)
"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Time, Lie, Children)
"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Life, Character, Blood, Fiction)
"I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Love, Tradition)
"I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write."
- Donna Tartt
"Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Life, Truth)
"Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Love, Children, Houses, Secrecy)
"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Experience, Funny, Job)
"Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Writing)
"I really do work in solitude."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Work, Solitude)
"I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Children, Innocence, Project)
"I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Idea, Children, Innocence)
"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Work, American, Writer, Writing)
"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: People, Murder)
"In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Work, Time, Order, Questions, Trying)
"It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens."
- Donna Tartt
(Related: Work, People, Influence, Will, Writing)