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" I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. "
Donna Tartt
Most
Where
Tradition
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" 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
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" Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life. "
Donna Tartt
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" 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. "
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" Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality. "
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" 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. "
Donna Tartt
You
Trying
Long
" 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
Stories
Long
People
" 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
" I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence. "
Donna Tartt
Innocence
Write
Think
" 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
Kind
You
Years
" I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there. "
Donna Tartt
Innocence
Think
Children
" 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
Time
Observation
" 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
Well
Book
Like
" 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
Way
Job
Funny
" When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain. "
Donna Tartt
Color
Leaf
Writing
" 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
Loved
Me
" Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction. "
Donna Tartt
Life
Blood
Character
" Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. "
Donna Tartt
Writing
Process
Big
" 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
Like
Product
Days
" 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
Long
Spark
Together
" 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
Friend
Landscape
" Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device. "
Donna Tartt
I Think
Think
Well
" I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones. "
Donna Tartt
Write
Than
Ten
" 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
Well-Spent
Writer
Way
" But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work. "
Donna Tartt
Own
Writer
Work
" The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. "
Donna Tartt
Things
Up
Color
" 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
Need
Think
Time
" It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens. "
Donna Tartt
People
Me
Influence
" I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. "
Donna Tartt
Write
Took
Only
" 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
Consequences
Studying
Learning
" Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. "
Donna Tartt
Even
Secret
Need