When I was a kid, I saw a really wasted Capote in the Port Authority, trying to get an indifferent homeless woman to talk to him. He was wearing a straw hat. (Image by Roger Higgins.)

In a 1957 interview with the Paris Review, Truman Capote described how he created a comfort zone for himself when writing:

“Paris Review: What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

Truman Capote: I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I am lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch lying down and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning, I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially, I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become enormously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.”