Top 36 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

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.

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.