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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.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Look
Tiny
Looks
Close
Whole
Bits
Hard
Stand
Sometimes
Focus
Make
Hand
World
Understand
Hands

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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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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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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
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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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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'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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The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
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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?
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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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Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
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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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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 hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
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When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
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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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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
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All those layers of silence upon silence.
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