#w

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#child #children #know #lie #like

Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#emotional #more #much #murky #observation

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

— Donna Tartt

#admire #american #american writer #essay #finished

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#characters #dickens #even #i #i love

Where there are large powers with little ambition, nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes. ↗

— Henry Taylor

#fallen #her #large #little #may

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. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#believe #experience #fringes #funny #funny way

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#decade #each #i #long #novels

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

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