From the Paris Review Interview of Truman Capote

A point so often made and so often ignored.

from Paris Review Interview of Truman Capote, 1957

INTERVIEWER
Are there devices one can use in improving one's technique?

CAPOTE
Work is the only device I know of. 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. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners. Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well, in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.

Precisely.  Joyce could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners.

At his very best Capote approaches Wilde in his aphorisms, see the final sentence.

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