Quote

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

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Littles
Painting
Creature
Briefly
Little
Single
Forced
Ankles
Always
Land
Chains
Struck
Finch
Think
Forever
Notice
Chain
Finches
Thinking
Point
Instance
Occasionally
Flickering
Life
Living
Sun
Existed
Ankle
Felt
Looked
Hopeless
Convergence
Place
Creatures
Cruel
Fluttering

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Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
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For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.
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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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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.
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
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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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I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view.
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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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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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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
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And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.
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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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I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
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All those layers of silence upon silence.
Donna Tartt