Wit & Attitude Quote by Donna Tartt

There is a mild taboo baked into Tartt's bluntness: we sentimentalize children as uncut innocence, then act shocked when they behave like small, adaptive animals. "Children lie all the time" isn’t a scold, it’s a correction to adult mythology. The dash-heavy phrasing mimics someone thinking aloud, almost coaxing the reader into complicity: if you actually remember childhood, you already know she’s right.

The intent is less about condemning kids than deflating the adult need to see them as morally pure. Tartt’s parenthetical detour - "what it was like to be a child and... to know other children" - widens the lens from private memory to social ecology. Kids lie not because they’re uniquely corrupt, but because they’re testing boundaries, negotiating status, staying safe, grabbing autonomy in a world run by bigger people. Lying is a tool; honesty is a luxury you can afford when you have power.

Subtextually, Tartt is also telegraphing her novelist’s obsession: the stories we tell are rarely clean, and the most convincing narrators are often the least reliable. Her fiction is full of characters who are trapped by the tales they spin, and this line reads like a seed crystal for that worldview. Childhood becomes the training ground where we learn that reality is pliable, that performance can be protection, that social life rewards plausible versions of the truth.

Context matters: coming from a writer associated with dark academia and moral ambiguity, the remark is a quiet thesis. The "innocent child" isn’t a fact; it’s a comforting genre. Tartt is changing the genre.