Top 36 Quotes by Donna Tartt

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.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

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

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.