Quote

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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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Time
Literature
Sparks
Process
Novels
Together
Period
Come
Periods
Many
Elements
Unexpectedly
Different
Aren
Conceptual
Long
Novel
Generated
Really
Single
Spark

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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.
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If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
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I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
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Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
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I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
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It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
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I really do work in solitude.
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