Donna Tartt
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.Collection: Romantic
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.Collection: Sad
Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.
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.
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.
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
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.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
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.
I really do work in solitude.
It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
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.
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.
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.
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 love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
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.
I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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.
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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 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.
The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.Collection: Book
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.Collection: Beautiful
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.Collection: Art
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.Collection: Book
Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.Collection: Hands
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about lifeCollection: Truth
And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Book
Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.Collection: Kids
A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.Collection: Heart
Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.Collection: Done
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.Collection: Love
Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.Collection: Action
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.Collection: Want