Donna Tartt Quotes

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

Donna Tartt

• Work
• Writing
• American

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.

Donna Tartt

• Work
• Reading
• Style

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.

Donna Tartt

• Childhood

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.

Donna Tartt

• Writing
• Business
• Hand

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

Donna Tartt

• Good
• Book

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

Donna Tartt

• Reality

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.

Donna Tartt

• Environment

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

Donna Tartt

• Long
• Writing

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

Donna Tartt

• Up
• Job
• Color

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

Donna Tartt

• Children

I really do work in solitude.

Donna Tartt

• Work
• Solitude

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.

Donna Tartt

• Time
• Children