Donna Tartt Quotes

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.

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

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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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I really do work in solitude.

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