Capote Quotations

I don't think Capote loved Smith. But he did make a deep connection. It upset some people, because that had never been the approach to journalistic crime writing, to look into the mind of the killer.

My dream dinner party guests would be Ethel Kennedy, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.

Philip insisted it would be wrong for him to break down and be so emotional. But, of course, when we rolled camera, he proceeded to do exactly what he'd argued against. It's what makes his performance feel so real. When he entered a scene, he was no longer thinking like an actor. He was thinking like Truman Capote would think.

I would go to the all-night grocery store and pretend that I was at Studio 54 because it was the only place open all night. Truman Capote in the frozen foods. Andy Warhol over in vegetables.

Capote was an enormously and dangerously ambitious, talented, conflicted guy who really concealed himself from the public. He was at once a very public figure and a very private figure. And this is a movie that sort of peels back the public mask and gets into the heart of darkness.

Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself. I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary.

Capote had these dueling motivations for being involved with this guy. He genuinely was fascinated with (Perry Smith), but he also saw him as a ticket to writing this great book.

Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends as next-door neighbors in the late 1920s, when they were about kindergarten age. From the start, they recognized in each other "an apartness," as Capote later expressed it; and both loved reading. When Lee's father gave them an old Underwood typewriter, they began writing original stories together.

That's what attracted me to it. I wasn't interested in doing it if it was just going to be about trying to portray Truman Capote and if I could be successful or not. It really was about the inevitability of a tragedy unfolding.

Too many people only thought of Capote as this odd, little man who showed up on talk shows during the '70s. This movie helps people remember that he was a very serious artist and writer, not just some self-absorbed celebrity.

Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure.

It was the perfect gift for Perry, who saw himself, like Thoreau, as an outsider persecuted by society. It made him feel good about himself, which is just what Capote wanted.

The movie shows how much of his life Capote put into 'In Cold Blood' and the toll it took on him. He made it a literary phenomenon and it was a hard act to follow. No matter what he did, he could never top it.

Somebody said the other day, at the end of the movie, you feel like Capote committed a crime, and that's exactly right. That's why the film works so well. You really have this sense that he's the one who committed the crime, and I think deep down inside, that's how he felt, too. That's something he could never come to terms with.

The Black and White Ball was a work of performance art. It was a work that was every bit as important to Truman Capote as everything that he wrote.

It's very hard now that the film is done and you can look at it to appreciate the magnitude of the risk he took and the possibility of horrible, embarrassing failure. Think about this character. Think about who Capote was. And think about Phil Hoffman, who's basically like a big guy with a baseball cap with a deep voice.

I'm really happy that I didn't see Capote until after we wrapped because I probably just would have been daunted because he was so remarkable in that movie.

If you have that kind of intimacy alongside ambition, ultimately it's going to leave an incredibly tragic impression on his psyche and spirit. He paid a huge price to write one of the great books of the 20th century. Capote didn't go to Kansas. Kansas reached out to New York and grabbed Capote. The minute he met Perry Smith, it was inevitable that these two men were going to die, one literally and one figuratively, because the identification they shared was too deep. The minute he got Perry to open up about his own life, and he learned they were both orphans, they were both abandoned children, he sees his muse, and that's the beginning of the end. Kansas sprung a trap on him.

I don't think there are many Capote letters that I have not seen for my biography and for 'Too Brief a Treat.' But there are undoubtedly some that I have not seen and that I hope will come to light someday.

I don't think Capote knew exactly what he was setting himself up for. He said later if he'd known what was going to happen, he would have driven right through the town like a bat out of hell.