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: 61
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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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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Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
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All those layers of silence upon silence.
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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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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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A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
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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'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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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.
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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.
Donna Tartt
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I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
Donna Tartt