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.
—Donna Tartt
Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Sympathy
isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Education, Prejudice, Tolerance
There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Envy
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Attitude, Determination, Worry
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Envy, Jealousy
Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
—Donna Tartt
Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Modesty
There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Enthusiasm, Reason
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Cheerfulness, Temper
Never do what you can’t undo.
—Donna Tartt
Love doesn’t conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Charity
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Envy
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that’s not really there.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Innocence
Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
—Donna Tartt
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Suffering
Hard to put things right. You don’t often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Jealousy, Character, Envy
We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
—Donna Tartt
Topics: Gratitude, Identity
After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.
—Donna Tartt
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Isabel Allende Chilean Novelist
- Marilynne Robinson Novelist, Essayist
- Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
- Anne Tyler American Novelist
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Carol Shields Canadian Author, Academic
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
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