Donna Tartt quotes

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very much different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment for what it actually was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.
-- Donna Tartt

#Thinking #Different #Daze

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
-- Donna Tartt

#Book #Writing #People

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
-- Donna Tartt

#Beautiful #Quiver #Terror

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

#Book #First Love #Aquariums

Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
-- Donna Tartt

#Lonely #Comfort #Gone

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
-- Donna Tartt

#Running #Dark #Doe

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
-- Donna Tartt

#Art #Believe #Reality

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
-- Donna Tartt

#Moon #Looks #Homesick

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
-- Donna Tartt

#Snow #Mountain #Melting

Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
-- Donna Tartt

#Want #Sometimes

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
-- Donna Tartt

#Beautiful #Fire #Hands

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.
-- Donna Tartt

#Fun #Book #Writing

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.
-- Donna Tartt

#New York #Moving #Writing

Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
-- Donna Tartt

#Love #Too Much

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?
-- Donna Tartt

#Beautiful #Caring #Care

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

#Reality #Lessons #Succeed

I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
-- Donna Tartt

#Laughter #Light #Secret

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
-- Donna Tartt

#Genuine

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

#Reading #Practice #Style

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
-- Donna Tartt

#Beautiful #Strong #Responsibility

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

#Book #Writing #Good Book

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

#Southern #Matter #Environment

It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!
-- Donna Tartt

#Morning #Past #Discovery

From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . .
-- Donna Tartt

#Song #Sheep #Singing

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
-- Donna Tartt

#Writing #People #Influence

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
-- Donna Tartt

#Children #Writing #Thinking

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.
-- Donna Tartt

#Thinking #Needs #Kind

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
-- Donna Tartt

#Romantic Love #Vision #Important

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
-- Donna Tartt

#Couple #Years #Expectations

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
-- Donna Tartt

#Hands #Style #Storytelling

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
-- Donna Tartt

#Sublime #World #Phenomenal

If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
-- Donna Tartt

#Not Happy

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
-- Donna Tartt

#Art #Jobs #Lying

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

#Couple #Book #Aunt

They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover.
-- Donna Tartt

#Girl #Winter #Cities

The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.
-- Donna Tartt

#Wall #Flower #Reflection

I really do work in solitude.
-- Donna Tartt

#Solitude

No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.
-- Donna Tartt

#Oatmeal #Holes #Sock

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
-- Donna Tartt

#Book #Hundred

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.
-- Donna Tartt

#Children #Emotional #Adults

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
-- Donna Tartt

#Book #Character #Long

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.
-- Donna Tartt

#America #Intellectual #Bigs

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

#Years #Experience #Weight

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

#Lonely #Writing #Mean

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

#Writing #Long #Process

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life
-- Donna Tartt

#Truth About Life #Sad Truth

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
-- Donna Tartt

#Character #Blood #Fiction

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

#Children #Thinking #Adults

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

#Children #Lying #Thinking

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work
-- Donna Tartt

#Pace #Vary

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy
-- Donna Tartt

#Children #House #Secret

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
-- Donna Tartt

#Challenges #Way #Projects

Beauty alters the grain of reality,
-- Donna Tartt

#Reality #Grain

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
-- Donna Tartt

#Beautiful #Stars #Distance

Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
-- Donna Tartt

#Thinking #Doe #Fool

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.
-- Donna Tartt

#Heart #People #Sorrow

Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.
-- Donna Tartt

#Mother #Said #Terror

But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’ Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.
-- Donna Tartt

#Thinking #Tears #Matter

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
-- Donna Tartt

#Grief #Intimate

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.
-- Donna Tartt

#Done #Enough #Scales

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.
-- Donna Tartt

#Memories #Solitude #Departed

If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
-- Donna Tartt

#Skulls #Mind #Bunnies

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
-- Donna Tartt

#Hands #Focus #Looks

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
-- Donna Tartt

#Lying #Thinking #Sad Life

Are you happy here?" I said at last. He considered this for a moment. "Not particularly," he said. "But you're not very happy where you are, either.
-- Donna Tartt

#Lasts #Moments #Where You Are

Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?
-- Donna Tartt

#Kindness #Who Cares #World

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
-- Donna Tartt

#Essentials #Way #Subtle