Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality. – Donna Tartt
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know. – Donna Tartt
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. – Donna Tartt
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. – Donna Tartt
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. – 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
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy. – Donna Tartt
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. – Donna Tartt
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there. – 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. – Donna Tartt
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. – Donna Tartt
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. – Donna Tartt
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. – 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. – Donna Tartt
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. – Donna Tartt
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. – 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. – Donna Tartt
It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens. – Donna Tartt
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. – 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. – Donna Tartt
