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All Quotes by author - Donna Tartt
" Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. "
Writing
Process
Big
" But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work. "
Own
Writer
Work
" But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know. "
Vision
Ugly
Hard
" Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction. "
Life
Blood
Character
" 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. "
Children
Time
Observation
" 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. "
Think
Time
Lie
" Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. "
Even
Secret
Need
" Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life. "
Me
Sad
Everything
" 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. "
Way
Job
Funny
" I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones. "
Write
Than
Ten
" I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. "
Work
Writing
Admire
" I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. "
Most
Where
Tradition
" 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. "
Stories
Long
People
" 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. "
You
Trying
Long
" I really do work in solitude. "
Really
Work
Solitude
" I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. "
Innocence
Think
Children
" I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. "
Innocence
Write
Think
" It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens. "
People
Me
Influence
" I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. "
Write
Took
Only
" 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. "
Long
Spark
Together
" 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. "
Own
Always
Business
" 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. "
Environment
Like
Matter
" Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality. "
You
Sometimes
Reality
" Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand. "
Style
Storytelling
Hand
" 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. "
Well-Spent
Writer
Way
" 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. "
Childhood
Loved
Me
" The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. "
Things
Up
Color
" 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. "
Book
Friend
Landscape
" 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. "
Consequences
Studying
Learning
" 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. "
Like
Product
Days
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