Quotes By Donna Tartt

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 really do work in solitude.