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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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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Appeal
Appeals
Stop
Littles
Little
Great
Even

More quotes by Donna Tartt

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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
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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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All those layers of silence upon silence.
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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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
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I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
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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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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?
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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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
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In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
Donna Tartt
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Beauty alters the grain of reality.
Donna Tartt
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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
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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
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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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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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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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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