Quote

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.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Practice
Refines
Looking
Partly
Reading
Innate
Doesn
Gift
Thing
Listening
Work
Style
Learned
Least

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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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
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I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
Donna Tartt
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I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
Donna Tartt
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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.
Donna Tartt
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If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood.
Donna Tartt
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...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.
Donna Tartt
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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Donna Tartt
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I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
Donna Tartt
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I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.
Donna Tartt
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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
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Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
Donna Tartt
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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
Donna Tartt
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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
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And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
Donna Tartt
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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
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I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
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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
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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
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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
Donna Tartt
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt