626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

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.

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.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

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.

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.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

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

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

People always want to call me a Southern writer but though I grew up in the South, I don't feel that the label quite fits my work.