Donna Tartt quotes - page 3

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. (Donna Tartt)
I really do work in solitude. View quote
Donna Tartt
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. View quote
Donna Tartt
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. View quote
Donna Tartt
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole. View quote
Donna Tartt
Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool. View quote
Donna Tartt
... as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. View quote
Donna Tartt
...still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life... View quote
Donna Tartt
We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us. We can't escape who we are. View quote
Donna Tartt
He was a planet without an atmosphere. View quote
Donna Tartt
As a writer, I think I'm more an eye than an ear - the world comes mainly in for me at the eye. So I'm glad the visuals came through for you. As I'm writing my books, I really do see them almost literally - I experience scenes almost as an onlooker, watching from the outside. (Donna Tartt)
This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we're always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person's soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best. View quote
Donna Tartt
I don't think it's a good idea for a writer to psychoanalyze herself or try to explain why she writes what she writes-it's a reductive way of looking at oneself and one's work. Readers really participate in the writing of a book. As a writer I'm giving the reader signs to help create the story with me. The reader is bringing his or her own memories, intelligence, preconceptions, prejudices, likes, dislikes. So the characters in your copy of the book are going to look and sound different than in mine. I have my own ideas, but once the book is out there it's not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn't any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging. View quote
Donna Tartt
I'm a bit of a lone wolf...I don't give interviews or do publicity unless I have a book out-too distracting. My desk is where the real work happens. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work. View quote
Donna Tartt
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. (Donna Tartt)
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. View quote
Donna Tartt
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. View quote
Donna Tartt