A Quote by Donna Tartt

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.
I do hope some of my work has a long lifetime. A piece that works out well this year may work out very well in twenty years' time as well, but I'm very much thinking about what's the right piece now, at this moment.
People I love and trust advise me to just drop off the face of the Earth for an extended period of time, and maybe that will calm or cool things down. But my work is very public work.
It's an interesting opportunity to do a long-form character and really have the time to find the nuance over an extended period of time. You can really dig deep.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.
I perform in art time and in real time, and you can't tell the difference - no one knows how to separate a real act from an art act in my work. When I lived on the street for a year, people only knew that I was homeless. They didn't know that I was an artist doing a piece. I have to use real time in my work. I do, however, have to find a subtle way of documenting real time, in order for people to have a response. That means punching into a work clock every hour in the case of one piece.
Value investing doesn't always work. The market doesn't always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn't work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that our value approach doesn't work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.
I'm constantly trying to work on the person that I am and work on my shortcomings, and I guess I want people to know that it's ok to be a work in progress, as long as you keep trying to figure it out. But that search and that discovery is what makes life kind of rich, and it's what makes life rich... period.
The producer, in effect, has to work as a translator. You form a very tight relationship with the director and writer from the beginning, and then you are constantly communicating to the various people that begin to come into the process, as you are trying to manage to hold on to a vision that needs to be communicated over a long period of time.
You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.
The only time I get frustrated with activist criticism is if I have recognized them, and invited them to work with me to figure out how we solve this problem that they're concerned about, and either they don't engage out of the sense of purity - "I'm not going to shake his hand" - or you're not sufficiently prepared so you don't even know what to ask for, or you're not being strategic as an activist and trying to figure out how the process has to work in order for you to get what you want.
If your work isn't mission-driven or emotionally resonant to you, it will be very hard to maintain passion and focus over a long period of time, which is critical in entrepreneurship.
You don't just find an empty museum and say, "I should do something here." I was looking for another kind of venue or exhibition format. I was trying to find a site where something could happen over a long period of time - something that could slowly transform itself and the place as it went. And I was also trying to stand out of the art-world system. Strangely enough, I stumbled on vacant museum.
My process of working is not really that unique. I like to paint during the day, and block out large chunks of time with which to work. I prefer to work on a painting in a few swift passes, and not fuss over it. I think that the work needs to have an energy to it that can't be accomplished if one is adding a few strokes everyday. Once a piece is done, I don't work on it anymore. I hate fussy.
It's a very weird job to have as a musician, because you spend long periods of time alone and then you have to go work with people for a long period of time and present your music after you've been making it by yourself. It's a very drastic phase.
I've always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won't be finished until I am dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.
But floating for an extended period is truly amazing. My brain is constantly trying to figure out which way is up. It's an interesting challenge, one I find slightly amusing.
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