Capote Quotes

“Poverty is much more than a way of life,” Jack later wrote. “It goes much farther than skin-deep. It’s no tattoo that fades with time. Nor a brand that can be put out of mind except when faced. Poverty, if you’ve known it, is you.”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“I can tell you, from a fund of experience, that one can be taken down from the rack, closer to death than to life—and then still have the most exquisite joys ahead of one.”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling,” Freud wrote, “he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings success with it.” The reverse might also be said, and a man who has been denied maternal esteem has also been denied that easy confidence, that wonderful feeling of triumph, with which the mother’s darling automatically greets every morning. If he does manage to achieve success, he often views it not as a gift, not as a birthright, but as a loan, and for the rest of his life he worries that it may be snatched away and given to someone more deserving. The emotional cost, the tension and the anxiety, may be considerable. Such”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“People simply will not accept the fact that there is such a thing as a homicidal mind,” he told the Senators, “that there are people who would kill as easily as they would write a bad check, and that they achieve satisfaction from it as I might from completing a novel or you from seeing a proposal of yours become law.” A”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“you understand much more about the value of a marriage when you’ve lost it,”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“He was opposed to capital punishment—“institutionalized sadism,” he termed it—and in favor of prison reforms that would emphasize rehabilitation. His opinions were generally conservative, however, and he did not subscribe to the fashionable view of the sixties that criminals were victims of society.”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“All human life has its seasons, and no one’s personal chaos can be permanent: winter, after all, does not last forever, does it? There”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“an embrace, if it comes with strings and conditions, can be more damaging than a rejection,”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography

“When Perry sat down n front of the judge to be arraigned, Truman nudged Nelle. “Look, his feet don’t touch the floor!” Nelle said nothing, but thought, “ Oh, oh! This is the beginning of a great love affair.” In fact, their relationship was more complicated than a love affair: each looked at the other and saw, or thought he saw, the man he might have been.”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote

“The juxtaposition of two such dissimilar works followed a pattern set earlier by “Miriam” and “My Side of the Matter,” and throughout the forties Truman’s short fiction alternated between the dark and the sunny, the terrifying and the amusing. The two magazines continued their tug of war over him for the rest of the decade. “Harper’s and Mademoiselle turned into temples which the cultists entered every month with the seldom fulfilled hope that the little god would have published a new story there,” was the way one critic, Alfred Chester, described the interest he aroused.”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote

“It’s a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism—everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I’m trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way.” In”
― Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography