110+ Donna Tartt Quotes On Writing, Intricate And Atmospheric

Donna Tartt is an American novelist who is best known for her 1992 debut novel, The Secret History. Her second novel, The Little Friend, was published in 2002 and her third novel, The Goldfinch, was published in 2013 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. Tartt is also the recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Goldfinch. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Donna Tartt on writing, intricate, atmospheric.

Top 10 Donna Tartt Quotes

1. When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
2. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
3. 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.
4. Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
5. 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.
6. Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

Donna Tartt Short Quotes

• Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
• Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
• Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
• It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
• Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
• Beauty alters the grain of reality.
• Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.
• I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
• Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
• ...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Donna Tartt Quotes About Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes About Work

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

I really do work in solitude. — Donna Tartt

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

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

Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress. — Donna Tartt

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work. — Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt Quotes About Children

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

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

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

Donna Tartt Quotes About Life

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

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. — Donna Tartt

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

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

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

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell. — Donna Tartt

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. — Donna Tartt

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

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away. — Donna Tartt

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

Donna Tartt Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place. — Donna Tartt

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

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

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

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. — Donna Tartt

For me - showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively - well, that's what it's like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time. — Donna Tartt

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

I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle. — Donna Tartt

I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. — Donna Tartt

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me. — Donna Tartt

...as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. — Donna Tartt

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. — Donna Tartt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate Gucci,' said Francis. 'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.' 'Come on, Henry.' 'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.' 'I don't see what you think is grand about that.' 'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry. — Donna Tartt

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death. — Donna Tartt

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

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

All those layers of silence upon silence. — Donna Tartt

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

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

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well. — Donna Tartt

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

I think it's especially important for an editor to say what he's enjoying. For a novelist to be told, midstream, what he's doing right can actually influence the unwritten parts of a novel in a positive way - praise helps a writer know what's good about what he's written, what's interesting and exciting, and what to work for in writing the conclusion. — Donna Tartt

What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy. — Donna Tartt

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

I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway. — Donna Tartt

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class. — Donna Tartt

Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous? — Donna Tartt

And the flavor of Pippa's kiss--bittersweet and strange--stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky. — Donna Tartt

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

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial — Donna Tartt

She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart. — Donna Tartt

Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way. — Donna Tartt

There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better. — Donna Tartt

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

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

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great — Donna Tartt

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

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

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

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

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore. — Donna Tartt

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

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead. — Donna Tartt

If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon . . . . The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood. — Donna Tartt

But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light. — Donna Tartt

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive. — Donna Tartt

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

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened. — Donna Tartt

Lexical variety, eccentric constructions and punctuation, variant spellings, archaisms, the ability to pile clause on clause, the effortless incorporation of words from other languages: flexibility, and inclusiveness, is what makes English great; and diversity is what keeps it healthy and growing, exuberantly regenerating itself with rich new forms and usages. — Donna Tartt

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

Life Lessons by Donna Tartt

1. Donna Tartt's work shows that it is important to take risks in order to create something unique and special. She encourages readers to be brave and explore the unknown, as it can lead to unexpected and wonderful discoveries.
2. Donna Tartt's work also demonstrates the power of perseverance and dedication. She shows that with hard work and dedication, even the most difficult of tasks can be accomplished.
3. Finally, Donna Tartt's work teaches us to never give up on our dreams, no matter how hard it may seem. She encourages us to keep striving for our goals, even when the odds are against us.