Life Lessons from Truman Capote

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we revisit some highlights from our 1976 and 1979 interviews with Truman Capote, New York City’s original gossip girl and author of seminal novels like Breakfast at Tiffany‘s and In Cold Blood.  Sit down, grab a pen—you just might learn a thing or two. 

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“I get up at five-thirty, boom! I immediately turn on something like I Love the Nightlife. I do my exercises to that and Instant Replay and I Will Survive. By the time I’ve finished all three of those I’ve done about a half hour of exercises. Then I rinse my face and take a fast bath and go in there and start writing.”

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“I learned to read when I was about four years old. I could read as good as—as “well” as—the average high school child when I was in the first grade, which caused me more trouble than anything else. The teachers, curiously enough, were very resentful of it.”

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“I was sued by a girl for one million dollars. She claimed that she was the character in my book, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She claimed that she was Holly Golightly, I had to get a lawyer. I had never met, seen or heard of this girl but her name was Golightly. The case dragged on in the courts for four years. It was another one of those things that cost me thirty-five thousand dollars. It’s so ridiculous. I’ve been sued a couple of times and never justly. Her picture was in Time magazine. She had no case at all. Talking about telephone books; we had been going through telephone books all over the country. We came up with about five thousand Golightlys. ”

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“I practically always throw out all my mail. I flip through those letters that say, ‘Won’t you sign this?’ or ‘I’ve got to write a school paper about blah blah’ or ‘Why don’t you tell me the whole story of your life?’ ”

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“There’s a lot of time that I don’t write. When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around. I’m one of the world’s greatest pencil sharpeners.”

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“I’ve got a great new drink: I’ll have half orange juice and half tomato juice without ice in it. I call it a Capotiana.”

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“I have always had a very extreme anxiety thing…It really began when I was a child. I was locked up for long periods of time and didn’t know when anybody was going to come and let me out. It created a tremendous sense of anxiety and I’ve never gotten rid of it…That’s really the reason I started drinking too much. It was the one thing that would stop the sense of anxiety. Of course all it did really was create a new anxiety. Since I decided to reorganize my life I have a great deal less anxiety.”

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“I don’t want to have a Toga party. I’ll leave that to the students at New York University.”

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“With one exception everybody who has ever been involved with me is still a great friend of mine. I was with Jack [Dunphy] for thirty years. For fifteen years I was faithful to Jack. When I wasn’t it was because I was with somebody else. We’re still the greatest friends. My life in that area has been pretty steady.”

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“Every day is a new day with me. All holds are off. All contracts are forgotten.”

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“I had acute appendicitis when I was in a remote part of Alabama when I was eight years old. There wasn’t any doctor for a hundred and twenty miles. I was going to die if they had to go that far. A horse doctor did [the operation]. Look at that terrible scar.”

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“I’ve got two theories. One is, there is nobody in the world that you can’t get…if you really want them. You’ve got to want it to the exclusion of everything else. That’s how I got Jack Dunphy. Everybody said I could never get him. He was married to a terrific girl, Joan McCracken. I liked her too, very much. I was just determined. I concentrated on it to the exclusion of everything else. It turned out it was a very good thing on all fronts. It was even good for Joan who then married Bob Fosse. She died very young. She had a heart attack. Whatever relationship you have, man or woman, you have to be very attentive and you have to be a very good friend to them regardless of what they do. Really being friends is the most important part, I think, of any relationship. If you can’t be friends with a lover, then forget it. It’s not going to work. I think my greatest talent really is for friendship.”