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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.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Vision
Away
Also
Certain
Hard
Truths
Important
Romantic
Life
Ugly
Lead

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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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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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When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
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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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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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I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
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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.
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One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
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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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If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
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...as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.
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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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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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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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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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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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