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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
Fiction
Blood
Character
Life
More quotes by Donna Tartt
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
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
It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.
Donna Tartt
When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
Donna Tartt
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Donna Tartt
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
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
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
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
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
Donna Tartt
Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
Donna Tartt
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
Donna Tartt
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
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
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
Donna Tartt
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
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
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Donna Tartt
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
Donna Tartt