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
american-novelist call fits grew label people quite southern though writer
People always want to call me a Southern writer but though I grew up in the South, I don't feel that the label quite fits my work.
american-novelist bit character echo family harriet mind recurring side state
There's also a bit of family echo in the character of Harriet. Harriet is kind of a recurring state of mind in my mother's side of the family.
american-novelist belt consumer couple dropping expectation novels production
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.
american-novelist character creating trick values
The trick of creating character is to try to see all people, even unsympathetic ones, without projecting one's own personality and values on them.
beautiful quiver terror
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
kids college air
Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.
jobs believe novelists
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.
children house secret
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy
diversity healthy growing
Lexical variety, eccentric constructions and punctuation, variant spellings, archaisms, the ability to pile clause on clause, the effortless incorporation of words from other languages: flexibility, and inclusiveness, is what makes English great; and diversity is what keeps it healthy and growing, exuberantly regenerating itself with rich new forms and usages.
mistake book fall
I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.
lonely gone done
Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
girl boys hair
Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.
successful views editors
I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."
running dark literature
Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?