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Donna Tartt Quotes


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

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

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

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

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 have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.