Quotes by Donna Tartt

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