Novel Quotes by Donna Tartt

10 Novel quotes by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt’s careful attention to narrative shines in ten short reflections on novels. Though compact, they provide a clear window into her thoughtful approach to storytelling.

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Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

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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The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Donna Tartt

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I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in…

Donna Tartt

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I think it's especially important for an editor to say what he's enjoying. For a novelist to be told, midstream, what he's…

Donna Tartt

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“I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a…

Donna Tartt

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I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

Donna Tartt

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And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them…

Donna Tartt

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And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the…

Donna Tartt

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“The world won't come to me...so I must go to it.”

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…

Donna Tartt

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“A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I…

Donna Tartt

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Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

Donna Tartt

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Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we…

Donna Tartt

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“The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. “You don’t have to talk,” she…

Donna Tartt

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“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and…

Donna Tartt

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“You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such…

Donna Tartt

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“maybe that’s what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through…

Donna Tartt

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“lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark—a thing made of…

Donna Tartt

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A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves…

Donna Tartt

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“Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his 'Asiatic…

Donna Tartt

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