Truman Capote Writing Quotations

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

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.

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

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.

I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

There is really no practical help that one can offer; it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own convictions, 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.

That's not writing, that's typing

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.

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.

Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.

Good writing is rewriting.

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.

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.

It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing.

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.