Donna Tartt Quotes

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

I've written a lot of books now; I've been published for over 30 years. I hope with every book I learn something new, and with every new novel I try to improve the process of writing.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.

I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

All experience helps when you write.

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

There's a lot of young authors out there, and people do seem to forget: in order to write well, you do need to have some experience.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.

When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.

I don't think much of anything I wrote before the age of 30.

I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

I've got my whole life. There's a lifetime of experience, a lifetime of experiencing the road and the music and different players. It makes me a richer human being. I have a greater source of information to tap into, a wealth of life.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

For years, I never really pondered how I came to be a writer from where I came from.

You should constantly write because your writing is always evolving and progressing. It's really important to start writing young.

But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'