Quote

Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.

Donna Tartt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Couldn
Quite
Happened
Way
Realized
Expected

More quotes by Donna Tartt

Image
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
Donna Tartt
Image
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
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.
Donna Tartt
Image
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
Image
I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
Donna Tartt
Image
I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
All those layers of silence upon silence.
Donna Tartt
Image
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
Donna Tartt
Image
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