Top 36 Quotes by Donna Tartt

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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'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.

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.