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.
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.
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."
moon looks homesick
When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.
genuine contrary
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
challenges way range
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
sublime world phenomenal
I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
couple years expectations
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.
oatmeal holes sock
No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.
pace vary
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work