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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: 61
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Needs
Large
Work
Spend
Kind
Amount
Really
Alone
Things
Literature
Time
Wells
Amounts
Think
Well
Centered
Thinking
Need
Kinds

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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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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I really do work in solitude.
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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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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
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Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time
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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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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.
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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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Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
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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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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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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
Donna Tartt
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But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’ Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.
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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.
Donna Tartt
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Donna Tartt
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I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
Donna Tartt
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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 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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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
Donna Tartt