Words matter. These are the best Donna Tartt Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.
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.
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.
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.
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy.
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.
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.
Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
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.
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.
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
I think it’s hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
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.
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.
I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
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.
Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality.
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.
But it’s for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
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.
It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens.
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.
