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All Donna Tartt Quotes
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
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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
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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
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I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
Donna Tartt
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Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
Donna Tartt
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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.
Donna Tartt
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In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.
Donna Tartt
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I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
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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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
Donna Tartt
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Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.
Donna Tartt
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Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
Donna Tartt
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But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
Donna Tartt
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Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
Donna Tartt
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