Donna Tartt Quotes
An American writer and author of the novels The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002).
(1963 - )
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Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
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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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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 just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
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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 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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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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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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