Truman Capote Quotes About Writing
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It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.
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I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
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Good writing is rewriting.
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There is really no practical help that one can offer: it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own conviction, or working with one's own work; your style is what seems natural to you. It is a long process of discovery, one that never ends. I am working at it, and will be as long as I live.
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When I'm writing, I never write more than four hours a day.
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If Francoise Sagan hadn't written a book called A Chateau in Sweden, I would certainly write a short story called A Chateau in Puerto Rico. And I may yet.
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You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
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I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.
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That isn't writing at all, it's typing.
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Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
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I always write the end of everything first. I always write the last chapters of my books before I write the beginning....Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it's always nice to know where you're going is my theory.
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I don't use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I'm a horizontal writer. I think better when I'm lying down.
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All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.
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When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.
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I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.
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One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.
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If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.
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Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
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Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
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One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.
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Technically I feel total fluidity in writing. I feel there's nothing technically that I can't do the way a certain sort of pianist feels that. But that doesn't mean it comes easily. It doesn't.
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If you happen to capture my imagination for some reason and I decide to write about you and you don't like what I wrote about you, which is entirely possible, then yes, I'm a dangerous writer.
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Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
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I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.
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I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.
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I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
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I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.
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When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.
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I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable.
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It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
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