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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.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
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More quotes by 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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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
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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.
Donna Tartt
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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.
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.
Donna Tartt
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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.
Donna Tartt
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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
Donna Tartt
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
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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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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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
Donna Tartt
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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
Donna Tartt
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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
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
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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.
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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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
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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.
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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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
Donna Tartt