Top 36 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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