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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.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Thinking
Need
Kinds
Needs
Large
Work
Spend
Kind
Amount
Really
Alone
Things
Literature
Time
Wells
Amounts
Think
Well
Centered

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In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
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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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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 began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.
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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
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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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Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
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I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
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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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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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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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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
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Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
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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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My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
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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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I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
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I really do work in solitude.
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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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