Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American writer.

Quotes

• I’m a bit of a lone wolf…I don’t give interviews or do publicity unless I have a book out—too distracting. My desk is where the real work happens.
  • On her philosophy regarding interviews and publicity in “Donna Tartt on The Goldfinch, Inspiration, and the Perils of Literary Fame” in Town & Country (2019 Sep 12)

• I don’t think it’s a good idea for a writer to psychoanalyze herself or try to explain why she writes what she writes—it’s a reductive way of looking at oneself and one’s work. Readers really participate in the writing of a book. As a writer I’m giving the reader signs to help create the story with me. The reader is bringing his or her own memories, intelligence, preconceptions, prejudices, likes, dislikes. So the characters in your copy of the book are going to look and sound different than in mine. I have my own ideas, but once the book is out there it’s not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn’t any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging.
  • On how writers should avoid analyzing their own work in “Donna Tartt on The Goldfinch, Inspiration, and the Perils of Literary Fame” in Town & Country (2019 Sep 12)

• This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we’re always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best.
  • On what novels convey to Tartt in “Interview with Donna Tartt” in Medium (2015 Jul 13)

• As a writer, I think I’m more an eye than an ear — the world comes mainly in for me at the eye. So I’m glad the visuals came through for you. As I’m writing my books, I really do see them almost literally — I experience scenes almost as an onlooker, watching from the outside.
  • On how she uses visualization in her writings in “Interview with Donna Tartt” in Medium (2015 Jul 13)

• Something I think you’re very conscious of growing up in the South is people who speak correctly and people who don’t…George Orwell said, ‘Englishmen are all branded on the tongue.’ It’s the same for southerners. I grew up around people who had wonderful, mellifluous voices; there’s also that twangy cracker accent. And then you were also aware of black English…
  • On how English is spoken amongst Southerners in “Smart Tartt” in Vanity Fair (Sep 1999)

Quotes about Donna Tartt

• (Any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors you’d like to recommend?) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love.
  • Jesmyn Ward Interview (2017)