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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Ones
Rather
Write
Book
Writing
Good
Mediocre
Ten

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Donna Tartt
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I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
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I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
Donna Tartt
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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.
Donna Tartt
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I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
Donna Tartt
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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.
Donna Tartt
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On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.
Donna Tartt
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
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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.
Donna Tartt
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Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
Donna Tartt
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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
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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.
Donna Tartt
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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.
Donna Tartt
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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
Donna Tartt
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In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
Donna Tartt
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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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Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
Donna Tartt
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If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
Donna Tartt
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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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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