Quote

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

Donna Tartt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Character
Minors
Even
Tradition
Love
Characters
Walk
Walks
Particular
Twitching
Alive
Dickens
Literature
Minor

More quotes by Donna Tartt

Image
Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
Donna Tartt
Image
If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
Image
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
Donna Tartt
Image
From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .
Donna Tartt
Image
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
Donna Tartt
Image
I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
Image
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
Donna Tartt
Image
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
Donna Tartt