Donna Tartt

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. ”

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. ”