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"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."
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"Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction."

"Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator."

"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"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."


"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."


"You'd be surprised, Theo." she said, leaning back in her shawl-shaped chair, "what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You're the one who has to watch for the open door."


"Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?"


"They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover."


"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."


"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."


"Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy."
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