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The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Often
Essential
Firsts
Essentials
Book
Loves
First
Childhood
Really
Inside
Way
Loved
Books
Internalized
Read
Aquariums

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
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.
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If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
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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.
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It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
Donna Tartt
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Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.
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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I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
Donna Tartt
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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
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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
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I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view.
Donna Tartt
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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
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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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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
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It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Donna Tartt
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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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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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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
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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