Conversations With Capote

by Lawrence Grobel

“The dogs bark and the caravan passes on.”

The time that that thing happened at the University of Maryland. Where you were allegedly drunk and you fell off the podium?

Georgia O’Keeffe

I think she’s a horrible person, too. I know her. Why is she so horrible? So arrogant, so sure of herself. I’m sure she’s carrying a dildo in her purse.

you’ll regret it the rest of your fat midget life.”

Marilyn Monroe told him about DiMaggio (“He can hit home runs. If that’s all it takes, we’d still be married.”)

In his book of travel pieces, Local Color, he wrote of Hollywood: “But how very correct, after all, that here at continent’s end we should find only a dumping ground for all that is most exploitedly American: oil pumps pounding like the heartbeat of demons, avenues of used-car lots, supermarkets, motels, the gee dad I never knew a Chevrolet gee dad gee mom gee whiz wham of publicity, the biggest, broadest, best, sprawled and helplessly etherized by immaculate sunshine and sound of sea and unearthly sweetness of flowers blooming in December.”

If he found Hollywood to be “the surface of the moon” in disguise, “the noplace of everywhere,” Capote also recognized that “Old people love California; they close their eyes, and the wind through the winter flowers says sleep, the sea says sleep: it is a preview of heaven.”

You’ve written of a point of life saturation, when everything becomes pure effort and total repetition.