top of page

"The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Creativity quotes

"No writer can be the 'Master of the Words' without loving them! Loving is the way for Mastering! No Love, no Master!"

"You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story."

"I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it."

"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"

"Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored. Writing is a jealous and needy lover."

"Some people have a handful of ideas, but not enough time to realize them."

"I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh."

"Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet."

"Like" and "like" and "like"-but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?"

"As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."


"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."


"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."


"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."


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


"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."


"Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive."


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