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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Character
Life
Fiction
Blood

More quotes by 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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And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
Donna Tartt
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When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
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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...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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Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you've even finished telling your story. One loses heart one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.
Donna Tartt
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All those layers of silence upon silence.
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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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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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
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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
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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Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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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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
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But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’ Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.
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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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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Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
Donna Tartt