Top 36 Quotes by Donna Tartt

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

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.

I really do work in solitude.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.