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 Read Quote
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. Donna Tartt Read Quote
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 Read Quote
I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. Donna Tartt Read Quote
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. Donna Tartt Read Quote
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. Donna Tartt Read Quote
It’s hard for me to show work while I’m writing, because other people’s comments will influence what happens. Donna Tartt Read Quote
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. Donna Tartt Read Quote
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. Donna Tartt Read Quote
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. Donna Tartt Read Quote
