Donna Tartt Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• 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

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Couple, Years, Expectations

  "Conversation with Donna Tartt, Author of 'The Little Friend'". Random House interview, www.randomhouse.com. October, 2003.

• Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

  Donna Tartt

  Running, Dark, Thinking

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

• 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

  Ideas, Literature, Students

• 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

  Long, Together, Different

• 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

  Rain, Writing, Color

• 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

  Long, People, Literature

• 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

  Aggravation, Challenges, Literature

• 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

  Order, Long, Work Out

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

  Donna Tartt

  Children, Thinking, Adults

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Southern, Literature, Matter

• 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.

  Donna Tartt

  Children, Emotional, Adults

  "A Conversation with Donna Tartt, Author of THE LITTLE FRIEND". Interview, www.penguinrandomhouse.com. October 22, 2002.

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

  Donna Tartt

  Character, Alive, Literature

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

  Donna Tartt

  Writing, Literature, Admire

• 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

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

  Donna Tartt

  Thinking, Literature, Murder

• 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

• 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

  Children, Lying, Thinking

• 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

  Thinking, Needs, Literature

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

  Donna Tartt

  Pace, Literature, Vary

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