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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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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Working
Happiness
Happy
Prerequisite
Prerequisites

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
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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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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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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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
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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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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But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
Donna Tartt
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After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
Donna Tartt
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
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Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
Donna Tartt
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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
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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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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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Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
Donna Tartt
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When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
Donna Tartt
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I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
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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Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
Donna Tartt
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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