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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.
Donna Tartt
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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Writing
Waiting
Dying
Novelist
People
Moral
Room
Hospital
Reading
Duty
Entertain
Read
Rooms
Traveling
Someone
Responsibility
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Entertaining
Book
Books
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Sick
Morale
More quotes by Donna Tartt
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
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.
Donna Tartt
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
...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
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
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
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
Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
Donna Tartt
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Donna Tartt
Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Donna Tartt
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
Donna Tartt
It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
Donna Tartt
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
Donna Tartt
You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.
Donna Tartt
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Donna Tartt
When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
Donna Tartt
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
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
