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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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Donna Tartt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Greenwood
Mississippi
Donna Louise Tartt
Firsts
Story
Book
Language
Diction
First
Use
Landscape
Different
Stories
Characters
Long
Also
Completely
Character
Approach
Littles
Friend
Little
Novel

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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.
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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.
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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.
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All those layers of silence upon silence.
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I really do work in solitude.
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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.
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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
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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.
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Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
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I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
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I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
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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.
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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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 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.
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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.
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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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But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
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I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
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