Donna Tartt Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Book, Reading, Being Alone

  66 Copy quote

• Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

  Donna Tartt

  Beautiful, Quiver, Terror

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.40, Vintage

  43 Copy quote

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

  Donna Tartt

  Reality, Lessons, Succeed

  23 Copy quote

• Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.

  Donna Tartt

  Hands, Sometimes, Poor

  10 Copy quote

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

  Donna Tartt

  Children, Thinking, Adults

  7 Copy quote

• It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

  Donna Tartt

  Book, Hundred, Knows

  18 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Art, Jobs, Lying

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Art, Believe, Reality

  25 Copy quote

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

  Donna Tartt

  Book, Writing, Mediocre

  7 Copy quote

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

  Donna Tartt

  Truth, Truth About Life, Take Me

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Book, First Love, Aquariums

  "A Conversation with Donna Tartt, Author of THE LITTLE FRIEND". Penguin Random House Interview, www.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  33 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Heart, People, Sorrow

  Donna Tartt (2013). “The Goldfinch”, p.575, Hachette UK

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Kids, College, Air

  Interview with Michael Pietsch, www.slate.com. October 11, 2013.

  7 Copy quote

• Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

  Donna Tartt

  Love, Too Much

  Donna Tartt (2013). “The Goldfinch”, p.450, Hachette UK

  6 Copy quote

• Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.

  Donna Tartt

  Way, Expected, Happened

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.507, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

  Donna Tartt

  Done, Enough, Scales

  Donna Tartt (1993). “The Secret History: A Novel”, Ballantine Books

  4 Copy quote

• Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

  Donna Tartt

  Action, Fullness, Nothingness

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.278, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

  Donna Tartt

  Want, Sometimes, Knows

  11 Copy quote

• Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

  Donna Tartt

  Lonely, Comfort, Gone

  Donna Tartt (2002). “The Little Friend”, Vintage

  20 Copy quote

• After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

  Donna Tartt

  Being Yourself, Littles, Appeals

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.155, Vintage

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Believe, Experience

  17 Copy quote

• And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

  Donna Tartt

  Beautiful, Stars, Distance

  29 Copy quote

• Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

  Donna Tartt

  Running, Dark, Doe

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.7, Vintage

  15 Copy quote

• It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!

  Donna Tartt

  Morning, Past, Discovery

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.88, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

  Donna Tartt

  Beautiful, Girl, Heart

  Donna Tartt (1993). “The Secret History: A Novel”, Ballantine Books

  4 Copy quote

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