Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Garcia Capotewas an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany'sand the true crime novel In Cold Blood, which he labeled a "nonfiction novel". At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced of Capote novels, stories, and plays...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 September 1924
CityNew Orleans, LA
CountryUnited States of America
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
Of many magics, one is watching a beloved sleep: free of eyes and awareness, you for a sweet moment hold the heart of him; helpless, he is then all, and however irrationally, you have trusted him to be, man-pure, child-tender.
And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.
I've got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I'm in it till the end of the race.
I will say only that all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and he cannot be denied the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.
Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.
Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.
I think most people are very, very much motivated by sex - greed, sex, and hunger.
When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.
I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.
Are the dead as lonesome as the living?
I just live one day at a time. That's my new theory in life.
Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.
Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.