Truman Capote Quotes about Writing

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Good writing is rewriting.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

That's not writing, that's typing

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.

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

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.

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

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.