Daily Inspiration Quote by Truman Capote

“Of course it is, and, in fact, my entire book is gossip. I don’t deny that for an instant. What I say is that all literature is gossip, certainly all prose-narrative literature. What in God’s green earth is Anna Karenina or War and Peace or Madame Bovary if not gossip? Or Jane Austen? Or Proust? Gossip is the absolute exchange of human communication. It can be two ladies at the back fence or Tolstoy writing War and Peace.”. This is the earliest primary-source attribution I could reliably trace via secondary documentation: Capote is described as saying it in an interview with Beverly Gray Kempton in Playboy magazine, in a recurring department titled “After Hours: Books,” dated December 1976. Many quote sites shorten this to “All literature is gossip.” but the fuller passage above is the form reported in the reference source. I was not able (in this search pass) to obtain a scanned image of the actual December 1976 Playboy pages to confirm the exact page number and to independently verify the punctuation/wording directly from the magazine itself; hence confidence is 'medium' rather than 'high'. If you need the *first* appearance (rather than a well-known later appearance), note that the same reference claims Capote had advanced the thought earlier the same year in connection with Esquire printing chapters from 'Answered Prayers', but I could not locate/verify the specific Esquire item and date from a primary scan within the current search results.