Quote

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

Donna Tartt

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Book
Superficially
Intimately
Hundred
Better

More quotes by Donna Tartt

Image
I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Donna Tartt
Image
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great
Donna Tartt
Image
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
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
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
When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
Donna Tartt
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Donna Tartt
Image
I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt
Image
Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
Donna Tartt
Image
I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.
Donna Tartt
Image
For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.
Donna Tartt