Quotes from Donna Tartt

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Beauty alters the grain of reality.

Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

Sometimes it's about playing a poor hand well.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Cubitum eamus? What? Nothing.

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Who was it that said that coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous?

We looked at each other. And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I'd liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I'd met him was that he was never afraid. You didn't meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call "the Planet of Earth.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.

Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Not quite what one expected, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;