Donna Tartt Quotes

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Donna Tartt

Profession : Novelist

Birth : December 23, 1963

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

Donna Tartt

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.

Donna Tartt

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.

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt

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.

Donna Tartt

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

Donna Tartt

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.

Donna Tartt

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

Donna Tartt

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

Donna Tartt

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

Donna Tartt

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.

Donna Tartt

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.

Donna Tartt