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INTERVIEWER
Did you have much encouragement [of your writing] in [your] early days, and if so, by whom?
CAPOTE
Good Lord! I’m afraid you’ve let yourself in for quite a saga. . . . I was thought somewhat eccentric, which was fair enough, and stupid, which I suitably resented. . . . Well, finally, I guess I was around twelve, the principal at the school I was attending paid a call on my family, and told them that in his opinion, and in the opinion of the faculty, I was “subnormal.” He thought it would be sensible, the humane action, to send me to some special school equipped to handle backward brats. Whatever they may have privately felt, my family as a whole took official umbrage, and in an effort to prove I wasn’t subnormal, pronto packed me off to a psychiatric study clinic at a university in the East where I had my I.Q. inspected. I enjoyed it thoroughly and—guess what—came home a genius, so proclaimed by science. I don’t know who was the more appalled: my former teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family, who didn’t want to believe it—they’d just hoped to be told I was a nice normal boy.
Find the complete Truman Capote interview in The Paris Review Interviews, I available now from Picador. |
 Download a PDF of the full interview |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Anton Chekhov, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, William Goyen, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, John Hersey, James Merrill, Katherine Anne Porter, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Styron, James Thurber, Eudora Welty, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, James Agee, Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Colette, Charles Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, Ronald Firbank, Gustave Flaubert, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, J. P. Marquand, W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, Carson McCullers, P. H. Newby, Flannery O'Connor, Eugene O'Neill, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Françoise Sagan, J. D. Salinger, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ivan Turgenev, Mark Twain, Colin Wilson, Virginia Woolf |
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