Quote #31

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

More from Donna Tartt

  1. Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
  2. 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 ti…
  3. 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 lit…
  4. 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 mo…
  5. 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.
  6. 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 …
  7. 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 i…
  8. 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 lis…

All Donna Tartt quotes