Truman Capote Quotes

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

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.

You can't make something beautiful by trying to make something beautiful. Something becomes beautiful in the process of trying to be something else.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Video is freeing, but also lazier. You have to recreate the love of the moment.

When I set out to write 'Sanctus,' all I wanted to do was craft a piece of high quality entertainment.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.

I don't want anyone to expect anything from me. I just want them to know that I'm gonna put 1,037% into whatever I do. If I tell you I'm gonna release a folk/reggae/country album, just know at bare minimum there's gonna be 1,010% put into it.

Writing is more important than being a writer.

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.