I can tell you, from a fund of experience, that one can be taken down from the rack, closer to death than to life – and then still have the most exquisite joys ahead of one.

He was opposed to capital punishment – “institutionalized sadism,” he termed it – and in favor of prison reforms that would emphasize rehabilitation. His opinions were generally conservative, however, and he did not subscribe to the fashionable view of the sixties that criminals were victims of society.

Poverty is much more than a way of life,” Jack later wrote. “It goes much farther than skin-deep. It’s no tattoo that fades with time. Nor a brand that can be put out of mind except when faced. Poverty, if you’ve known it, is you.

People simply will not accept the fact that there is such a thing as a homicidal mind,” he told the Senators, “that there are people who would kill as easily as they would write a bad check, and that they achieve satisfaction from it as I might from completing a novel or you from seeing a proposal of yours become law.” A.

All human life has its seasons, and no one’s personal chaos can be permanent: winter, after all, does not last forever, does it? There.

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.

He said at the time that the book scraped him down to the marrow of his bones. It changed him.

Before Truman, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously. Journalism was seen as a hack profession that had very little style, very little grace. After In Cold Blood , people saw real-life stories in a different way.

It was the most dramatic and probably the most important period in his life, and it changed him radically in all sorts of ways,

They were convicted almost immediately in March of 1960, but the appeals lasted 5 years. And it was hard on them, as you can imagine, and hard on Truman.