Donna Tartt Quotes

112 quotes in 1723 categories

• Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
• There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from…
• Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
• But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
• 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…
• Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
• I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
• I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
• I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
• 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…
• I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
• 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…
• It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
• 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…
• I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
• If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
• 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…
• Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
• 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…
• Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life

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