Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt
Donna Tarttis an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch. Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prizefor The Goldfinch in 2014 and she was named in the TIME 100: The 100 Most Influential People in 2014...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 December 1963
CityGreenwood, MS
CountryUnited States of America
order work-out long
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.
writing people influence
It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.
distance events growing
Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
morning past discovery
It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!
silence layers
All those layers of silence upon silence.
hate thinking people
I hate Gucci,' said Francis. 'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.' 'Come on, Henry.' 'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.' 'I don't see what you think is grand about that.' 'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry.
writing long process
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
not-happy ifs prerequisites
If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness.
character alive tradition
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
hands focus looks
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
job novelist
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.