Truman Capote (1924–84,) originally Truman Streckfus Persons, was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. His works range from the light-hearted short novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958; film, 1961) to the grim and meticulous re-creation of a brutal multiple murder in In Cold Blood (1966; film, 1967.) The latter helped begin the true crime genre, in addition to the nonfiction novel.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Capote started writing short stories in his teens. He published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948,) when he was just 24 years old. His early works defined many of the social conventions of the profoundly conservative post-war years through their sympathetic portrayal of characters generally deemed immoral or amoral.
Capote’s plays include House of Flowers (1954,) The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968,) and Trilogy: An Experiment in Multimedia (1969.) He also enhanced his reputation with his sarcastic journalism and shorter prose pieces, some of which appeared in the collections Then It All Came Down (1976) and Music for Chameleons (1980.)
Capote was a childhood friend of the novelist Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960; film, 1962.) She worked as his assistant on his book In Cold Blood; their friendship was dramatized in the films Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Truman Capote
Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.
—Truman Capote
Fame is only good for one thing—they will cash your check in a small town.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Fame
All literature is gossip.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Literature, Gossip
Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Love
It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
—Truman Capote
Topics: America
I’ve always seen myself as a winner, even as a kid. If I hadn’t, I just might have gone down the drain a couple of times. I’ve got something inside of me, peasant like and stubborn, and I’m in it ’til the end of the race.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Confidence, Assurance
Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Drinking
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.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Authors & Writing
It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils at the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Passion
Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can’t have too many friends because then you’re just not really friends.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Friends, Friendship
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Conversation, Communication
Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Confidence
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Success, Adversity, Failure, Strength
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Prayer
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Birthdays
Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Lawyers, Law
It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.
—Truman Capote
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Words, Authors & Writing, Writing
The true beloveds of this world are in their lover’s eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Love
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Art, Writing
People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don’t want to see, you add this if it isn’t there. And so therefore you’re building a lie.
—Truman Capote
Topics: Relationships
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