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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

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Really
Spoken
Way
Novelists
Speaking
Literature
Funny
Jobs
Fringes
Experience
Fringe
Believe
Novelist

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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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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I really do work in solitude.
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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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
Donna Tartt
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
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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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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All those layers of silence upon silence.
Donna Tartt
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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
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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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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
Donna Tartt
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For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.
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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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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? 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
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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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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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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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