#d

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I'm as bald as a billiard ball! ↗

— James Taylor

#bald #ball #difference #fortunately #i

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#engage #extended #find #important #long

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#conceptual #different #different elements #elements #generated

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#been #business #devices #hand #i

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#entire #environment #faulkner #held #i

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

— Donna Tartt

#hard lesson #lesson #reality #right #right things

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

— Donna Tartt

#elegant #go #hand #storytelling #style

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#command #consider #extends #grows #i

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#childhood #essential #first #i #inside

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#innate #learned #least #listening #looking