Donna Tartt

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. ”

Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive. ”

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. ”

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. ”

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work. ”

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much. ”

I really do work in solitude. ”