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
book character long
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.
character blood fiction
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction
character alive tradition
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
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 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.
job novelist
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
trying want achieve
There's nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you're trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.
heart cutting thinking
Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you've even finished telling your story. One loses heart; one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.
writing thinking editors
I think it's especially important for an editor to say what he's enjoying. For a novelist to be told, midstream, what he's doing right can actually influence the unwritten parts of a novel in a positive way - praise helps a writer know what's good about what he's written, what's interesting and exciting, and what to work for in writing the conclusion.
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.
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."
way coincidence said
Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
distance events growing
Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
grief light world
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.