Quotes by Donna Tartt

About Donna Tartt:

Donna Tartt is an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize (Fiction) for The Goldfinch in 2014 and she was named to the TIME 100: The 100 Most Influential People in 2014.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Donna Tartt

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

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

Donna Tartt

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

First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.

Donna Tartt

You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entirely, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time -- four hundre...

Donna Tartt

The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything.

Donna Tartt

Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.

Donna Tartt

Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

Donna Tartt

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.

Donna Tartt

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?

Donna Tartt

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.

Donna Tartt

Well -- think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no -- hang on -- this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing ...

Donna Tartt

I believe having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially

Donna Tartt

I believehaving a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially

Donna Tartt

...life - whatever else it is - is short... maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

Donna Tartt

He's a funny one," said Ida. "Here's how he sound." She pursed her lips and, expertly, imitated the red-winged blackbird's call: not the liquid piping of the wood thrush, which dipped down into the dry of the cricket's birr and up again in delerious,...

Donna Tartt

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with p...

Donna Tartt

The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the...

Donna Tartt

It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

Donna Tartt

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now ...

Donna Tartt

Author Bio

  • NameDonna Tartt
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornDecember 23, 1963
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • WorksThe Secret History; The Little Friend; The Goldfinch