Donna Tartt Quotations

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life

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.

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

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

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

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.

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.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

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.

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

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.

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

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.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.

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.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very much different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.

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?

For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time.

Beauty alters the grain of reality,

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

I really do work in solitude.

Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover.

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.

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.

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.

If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

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

What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.

I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

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.

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.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

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.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

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.

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.

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.

But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’ Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

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.

If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

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.

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.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

As I stood with her on the platform - she impatient, tapping her foot, leaning forward to look down the tracks - it seemed more than I could bear to see her go. Francis was around the corner, buying her a book to read on the train. 'I don't want you to leave,' I said. 'I don't want to, either.' 'Then don't.' 'I have to.' We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes. Camilla, I love you,' I said. 'Let's get married.

It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call “the Planet of Earth.

Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?

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.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;

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.