Donna Tartt Quotes

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Donna Tartt

Profession : Novelist

Birth : December 23, 1963

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

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

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

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

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

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

Donna Tartt

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

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

I really do work in solitude.

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

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

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

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

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

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

Donna Tartt

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

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

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