626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.

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

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

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.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.