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Donna Tartt Quotes


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Donna Tartt
December 23, 1963 -
Nationality: American
Category: Novelist
Subcategory: American Novelist

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

   

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

   

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.

   

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

   

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

   

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

   

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

   

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

   

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.

   

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.

   

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

   

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.

   

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.

   

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.

   

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

   

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.

   

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

   

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.

   

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.

   

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.

   

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