Authors:  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Donna Tartt's Quotes

Donna Tartt profile photo

Born: 1963-12-23
Profession: Novelist
Nation: American
Biography of Donna Tartt

See the gallery for quotes by Donna Tartt. You can to use those 5 images of quotes as a desktop wallpapers.
Donna Tartt's quote #1
Donna Tartt's quote #2
Donna Tartt's quote #3
Donna Tartt's quote #4
Donna Tartt's quote #5

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

Tags: Device, Found

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.

Tags: Children, Emotional, Time

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.

Tags: Experience, Funny, Job

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.

Tags: Time, Trying, Work

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.

Tags: Business, Lonely, Writing

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.

Tags: Matter, Sense, Writer

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.

Tags: Book, Friend, Story

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.

Tags: Him, Ideas, Learning

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.

Tags: Couple, Days, Line

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.

Tags: Book, Old, Quite

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.

Tags: Experience, Put, Takes

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.

Tags: Loved, Often, Read

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.

Tags: Learned, Looking, Work

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

Tags: Children, Love, Secret

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

Tags: Life, Sad, Truth

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.

Tags: Except, Stories, Sure

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.

Tags: Single, Time, Together
Visit partners pages
Visit partners pages
Much more quotes by Donna Tartt below the page.

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.

Tags: Taking, Time, Writer

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.

Tags: Alone, Time, Work

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.

Tags: After, Rain, Writing

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

Tags: Big, Enjoy, Writing

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

Tags: Decide, Work, Writer

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

Tags: Hard, Life, Romantic

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

Tags: Blood, Character, Life

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.

Tags: Children, Lie, Time

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

Tags: American, Work, Writing

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

Tags: Alive, Characters, Love

I really do work in solitude.

Tags: Solitude, Work

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

Tags: Children, Innocence, Project

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

Tags: Children, Hard, Write

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

Tags: Book, Good, Rather

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

Tags: Both, Took, Write

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

Tags: Hard, Work, Writing

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

Tags: Hard, Reality, Sometimes

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

Tags: Elegant, Hand, Style

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

Tags: Color, Invent, Job
Sualci Quotes friends