Zitat des Tages von Donna Tartt:
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.
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.
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.
Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
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.
I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.
I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.
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.
Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
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.
I really do work in solitude.
There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
Well, I do have some maiden aunts that are not quite like the aunts in the book, but I definitely do have a couple of them, and a couple of old aunties.
