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

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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

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

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

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
- Donna Tartt Quote

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.
- Donna Tartt Quote