Truman Capote, 1975

Preface, Music for Chameleons

..."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.

Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, have a lot in common with another breed of lonely men – the guys who make a living shooting pool and dealing cards.

It was a lot of fun – at first. It stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad, and then made an even more alarming discovery: the difference between good writing and true art; it is subtle, but savage. And after that, the whip came down.

In a story by Henry James, I think The Middle Years, his character, a writer in the shadows of maturity, laments: ‘We live in the dark, we do what we can, the rest is the madness of art’.

While I write, I’m here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards – and, of course, the whip God gave me."