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

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Realized
Expected
Couldn
Quite
Happened
Way

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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
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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.
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I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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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.
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It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.
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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.
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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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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
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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.
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Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you've even finished telling your story. One loses heart one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.
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I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
Donna Tartt
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But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
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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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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 really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
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In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
Donna Tartt
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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
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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?
Donna Tartt