Quote

If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.

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
Prerequisite
Prerequisites
Working
Happiness
Happy

More quotes by Donna Tartt

Image
Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
Donna Tartt
Image
Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
Donna Tartt
Image
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
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
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
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
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
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
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
Image
I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
Image
All those layers of silence upon silence.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
Donna Tartt