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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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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Sublime
Enter
Leave
Ready
Hope
World
Phenomenal
More quotes by Donna Tartt
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
Donna Tartt
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.
Donna Tartt
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Donna Tartt
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.
Donna Tartt
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.
Donna Tartt
Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
Donna Tartt
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Donna Tartt
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
Donna Tartt
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.
Donna Tartt
Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
Donna Tartt
It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
Donna Tartt
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.
Donna Tartt
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
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.
Donna Tartt
For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.
Donna Tartt
And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.
Donna Tartt
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
Donna Tartt
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
Donna Tartt
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