Donna Tartt Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”