Donna Tartt Quotes

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.

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

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.

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.

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

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

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

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.

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.

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.

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

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

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.

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

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

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

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

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

Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?

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.

...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.

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

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

I really do work in solitude.

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

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