Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Donna Tartt
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Weight
Novel
Simply
Takes
Experience
Kind
Years
Accumulates
Richness

More quotes by Donna Tartt

Image
One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
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
I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
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 guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
Donna Tartt
Image
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
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
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
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
Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
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
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
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
...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
Image
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
Donna Tartt