Donna Tartt

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#club #even #houses #love #need

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

#entire #environment #faulkner #held #i

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#hard lesson #lesson #reality #right #right things

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

— Donna Tartt

#elegant #go #hand #storytelling #style

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

#command #consider #extends #grows #i

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#childhood #essential #first #i #inside

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#embellish #invent #job #make #novelist

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#approach #book #characters #completely #diction

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#innate #learned #least #listening #looking

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

#belt #consumer #conveyor #couple #days