Donna Tartt Quotes
Donna Tartt offers a quietly thoughtful look at writing, creativity and the challenges of imagination.
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Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
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Anyway, it gets into one's blood, this long lonely way of writing, like a long sea-voyage.
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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.
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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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Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.
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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.
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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.
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Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.
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Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
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For a novelist to create character, I think, takes a sharp objective eye but also an intuitive intelligence, a receptiveness, a wilingness to make oneself blank in order to percieve things as they actually are.
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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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I have a grand - I wouldn't call my grandmother domineering, no, but this novel is about the way that family traits echo and reverberate through generations and often skip generations.
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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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I really do work in solitude.
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I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
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I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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I'm not so interested in the act of murder as in the echoes and repercussions of the act, and how they play out over time.
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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.
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I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
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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.
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In the South there are so many different ways of talking, and there's the, you know, educated Southern speech; there is midlevel, sort of salesman Southern speech; there is, you know, uneducated, very colloquial speech.
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It's great to be around people and it's thrilling and exciting, but it jangles me.
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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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It's interesting when a book comes to you. It comes to you in sort of flashes and you don't quite understand how they connect.
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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.
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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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People always want to call me a Southern writer but though I grew up in the South, I don't feel that the label quite fits my work.
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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.
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Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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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.
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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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The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
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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.
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The trick of creating character is to try to see all people, even unsympathetic ones, without projecting one's own personality and values on them.
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There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
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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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Well, a novel does acquire a certain kind of richness when you work on it for a long time that can't really be faked.
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Well, I didn't know any snake-handling ministers.
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Well, I'm not interested in murder so much in the aspects of, you know, sleuthing and detection and that sort of thing. I'm much more interested in the echoes and repercussions of the act through time.
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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.
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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.
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The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.
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Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.
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She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.
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Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
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I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.
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Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
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If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
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And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
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I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
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And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
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And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
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Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
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Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.
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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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Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
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Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
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Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.
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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.
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The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
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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.