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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

I really do work in solitude.
Donna Tartt

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

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

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

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

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