The One Mystery (Truman Capote)

A work of art is the one mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology. (Self-Portrait)

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Reflected reality is the essence of reality, the truer truth.... if I was in a strange room, and wanted to understand the room and the nature of its inhabitants, I let my eye wander selectively until it discovered something -- a shaft of light, a decrepit piano, a pattern in the rug -- that seemed of itself to contain the secret. All art is composed of selective detail, either imaginary or, as in "In Cold Blood," a distillation of reality. (Ghosts in Sunlight)

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It was desperate to feel that one could never be a part of moments so moving, that always one would be isolated from this landscape and these people; and then gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: rather, it could be a part of me. (To Europe)

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(New York)

She belongs to that sect most swiftly, irrevocably trapped by New York, the talented untalented; too acute to accept a more provincial climate, yet not quite acute enough to breathe freely within the one so desired...

Only success, and that a perilous peak, can give relief, but for artists without an art, it is always tension without release, irritation with no resulting pearl. Possibly there would be if the pressure to succeed were not so tremendous. They feel compelled to prove something, because middle-class America, from which they mostly spring, has withering words for its men of feeling, for its young of experimental intelligence, who do not show immediately that these endeavors pay off on a cash basis. But if a civilization falls, is it cash the inheritors find among the ruins? Or is it a statue, a poem, a play?

...Could it be that the transition from innocence to wisdom happens in the moment when we discover not all the world loves us? Most of us learn this too early...

Later on, when one is older and in love, it is the double vision of sharing with your beloved which gives experience texture, shape, significance. To travel alone is to journey through a wasteland...

...once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder.