Donna Tartt

Literary Birthday – 23 December – Donna Tartt

Happy Birthday, Donna Tartt, born 23 December 1963.

Donna Tartt: Nine Storytelling Quotes

  1. I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
  2. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, travelling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.
  3. I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
  4. Storytelling and elegant style don’t always go hand in hand.
  5. The books I loved in childhood – the first loves – I’ve read so often that I’ve internalised them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.
  6. The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to colour, to embellish, to make things up.
  7. 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.
  8. I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
  9. 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 is an American writer and the author of the novels, The Little Friend, The Secret History and The Goldfinch. She won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend and the Pulitzer for The Goldfinch.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donna_Tartt.jpg

Antonio Monda, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 23rd December 2012
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