Donna Tartt

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.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

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.

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.

I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

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

Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.

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.

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.

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.