Donna Tartt

But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

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.

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.

Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.

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.

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.