Quotable Quotes - Donna Tartt quotes

Donna Tartt quotes

“Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.” — Donna Tartt

“Anyway, it gets into one's blood, this long lonely way of writing, like a long sea-voyage.” — Donna Tartt

“But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.” — Donna Tartt

“But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.” — Donna Tartt

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“Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“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

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“Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.” — Donna Tartt

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“Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.” — Donna Tartt

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“For a novelist to create character, I think, takes a sharp objective eye but also an intuitive intelligence, a receptiveness, a wilingness to make oneself blank in order to percieve things as they actually are.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“I have a grand - I wouldn't call my grandmother domineering, no, but this novel is about the way that family traits echo and reverberate through generations and often skip generations.” — Donna Tartt

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“I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.” — Donna Tartt

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“I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.” — Donna Tartt

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“I really do work in solitude.” — Donna Tartt

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“I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.” — Donna Tartt

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“I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.” — Donna Tartt

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“I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.” — Donna Tartt

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“I'm not so interested in the act of murder as in the echoes and repercussions of the act, and how they play out over time.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“In the South there are so many different ways of talking, and there's the, you know, educated Southern speech; there is midlevel, sort of salesman Southern speech; there is, you know, uneducated, very colloquial speech.” — Donna Tartt

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“It's great to be around people and it's thrilling and exciting, but it jangles me.” — Donna Tartt

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“It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.” — Donna Tartt

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“It's interesting when a book comes to you. It comes to you in sort of flashes and you don't quite understand how they connect.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“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

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“People always want to call me a Southern writer but though I grew up in the South, I don't feel that the label quite fits my work.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.” — Donna Tartt

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“Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“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

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“The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.” — Donna Tartt

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“The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“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

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“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

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“The trick of creating character is to try to see all people, even unsympathetic ones, without projecting one's own personality and values on them.” — Donna Tartt

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“There's also a bit of family echo in the character of Harriet. Harriet is kind of a recurring state of mind in my mother's side of the family.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“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

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“Well, a novel does acquire a certain kind of richness when you work on it for a long time that can't really be faked.” — Donna Tartt

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“Well, I didn't know any snake-handling ministers.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.” — Donna Tartt

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“Well, I'm not interested in murder so much in the aspects of, you know, sleuthing and detection and that sort of thing. I'm much more interested in the echoes and repercussions of the act through time.” — Donna Tartt

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“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

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“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

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