Truman Capote Quotes

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

There is a plethora of topics to explore. I sometimes think I may never live long enough to explore all of the unique story lines I have either in my head or waiting in my computer file.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write.

In my head, at least, the business of spinning stories has no closing time. Twists in my characters' lives, glimpses of their secrets, obstacles to their dreams... all arrive unbidden when I'm getting cash at the ATM, walking my son to camp, singing a hymn at a wedding.

Every day I fantasise about situations and little themes I see in front of me that would make a good beginning of a story. But one has to be disciplined and just sit down and do it.

I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.