I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. Donna Tartt More Quotes by Donna Tartt More Quotes From Donna Tartt The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone. Donna Tartt being-alone reading book Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. Donna Tartt quiver terror beautiful 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 aquariums first-love book And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. Donna Tartt believe reality art If I'm not working, I'm not happy. That's it. That's the prerequisite for me for happiness. Donna Tartt prerequisites not-happy ifs 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 experience jobs believe 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 style reading practice 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. Donna Tartt lonely gone comfort A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are. Donna Tartt sorrow heart people It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially. Donna Tartt hundred knows book 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. Donna Tartt mistake book fall And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. Donna Tartt distance stars beautiful What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Donna Tartt strong responsibility beautiful After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great Donna Tartt appeals being-yourself littles There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial Donna Tartt superficial meaningful But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead. Donna Tartt grief light world Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? Donna Tartt dark doe running Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality. Donna Tartt succeed lessons reality 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 literature needs thinking From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . . Baa baa baa . . . Gentlemen songsters off on a spree . . . Doomed from here to eternity . . . Donna Tartt gentleman sheep song
