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. ”