Donna Tartt Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”