626 Quotes by Donna Tartt

All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I’d ever seen began to pop into my mind – the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.

There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.

And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.

Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher.

I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

I’d always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There’s nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn’t want to take, but took anyway.

A truck shot past in a whine of spray.

There’s nothing like having a sympathetic reader who asks the right questions, who understands what you’re trying to achieve and only wants to make it better.

To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!