Donna Tartt Quotes

• Birds – birds, everywhere, great black cawing explosions of them, like radioactive fall-out, like shrapnel.

  Donna Tartt

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• I’d love to write a book a year, but I don’t think I’d have any fans.

  Donna Tartt

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• The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

  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

• When I’m writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

  Donna Tartt

• Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

  Donna Tartt

• Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.

  Donna Tartt

• 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

• 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

• The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they’re learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

  Donna Tartt

• 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

• The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

  Donna Tartt

• 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

• Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one’s range as a writer, one’s technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.

  Donna Tartt

• Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.

  Donna Tartt

• Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that’s a hard lesson of reality.

  Donna Tartt

• So I’m not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

  Donna Tartt

• 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

• 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

• It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens.

  Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt (38)

Birth:	23rd December, 1963
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi. She is an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch. She won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch in 2014.

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Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

• 1958 - Rickson Gracie
• 1989 - Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte
• 1963 - Nicollette Sheridan
• 1971 - Michael Strahan
• 1870 - Alexander Berkman

Deaths

• 1926 - Joseph McKenna
• 1959 - Max Baer
• 1996 - Mohammad Abdus Salam
• 1999 - Quentin Crisp
• 1922 - Ricardo Flores Magon