Donna Tartt

“Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.”

“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?”

“How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.”

“their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be”

“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.”

“[T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.”

“...not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.”

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

“The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.”

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

“Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”

“Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.”

“My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of 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.”

“But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air.”

“And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”

“But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.”

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

“משום שמיסיסיפי מפורסמת מאוד בסופרים שלה: פוקנר, טרומן קפוטה, טנסי ויליאמס. הבדיחה על מיסיסיפי היא שיותר אנשים שם יודעים לכתוב מאשר לקרוא.”

“חשוב להראות באמנות את המנגנון של הרוע.”