I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.
Truman CapoteRead
Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on how intense heat reveals the hidden qualities and life of a city.
Truman Capote's quote poetically describes the transformative power of hot weather on a city, suggesting that elevated temperatures not only reveal the city's infrastructure but also its very essence and vitality. The imagery of a 'white brain' and 'heart of nerves' evokes a sense of the city as a living organism, animated by its inhabitants and environment, with a smell that transcends the ordinary and connects the reader to the raw, almost primal nature of urban life.
In practice
In a discussion about urban life and how it changes with the seasons.
I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.
All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.
No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.
I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.
The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.
My yardstick is how somebody treats me.
I want to sing more in Spanish. I want to sing the songs of Granados; the songs of Montsalvatge. To do things that truly I've not done before.
Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations ... Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
Books are seldom useful unless they are also beautiful.
Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.
San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.
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