On William Goyen's review in the New York Times Book Review: "'A valentine'! Now, wasn't that a bitchy word to use?"

On Leslie Fiedler's remarks about the Harper's Bazaar "literary academy" (of which Capote was supposedly a prominent member): "Critics have to make a living." The same was true, he added, about "all this Beat Generation talk. I read Kerouac and that other fellow, that poet, and they have nothing in common. Critics just have to have something to say, to write about."

And finally, on current critical ballyhoo about the South as a source of symbol and meaning: "Tommyrot. You can say Faulkner, but not really. The only really regional writer in the South was the creator of Br'er Rabbit."

Capote's present projects include a New Yorker article scheduled for the spring, about his winter in Moscow. He returned a second time after touring with the Porgy and Bess troupe and writing The Muses Are Heard account of it all. And he found life as a private citizen more congenial than the spot-lit existence of artists on tour.

"It's a fascinating place, a new experience. One spends so much time feeling on the surface, thinking you're perceptive. And then comes a real test."

The Soviet Writers Union threw a party for him and sponsored a debate in his honor. "Most Soviet writers," he commented, "would starve to death in the U.S."

"A fellow named Mitchell Wilson is the favorite American author over there. Have you ever heard of him? I never had."

He feels that the Russian arts all froze at about 1923. Even the best motion pictures were little more than pale imitations of German experimentalism, in the 1930's. And the ballet, "while given lavish productions and excellently performed, is a little old-fashioned. Nothing modern--about 1910 in conception."

Future fiction. "I'm working on a rather long novel. But it's a very long way away. Three years or so."

Capote dramatizes his conversation with elaborate hand gestures. He has a deft trick of touching his tongue, presumably for loose tobacco ("I never smoke those filter-tips; nothing comes through"), and then touching his fingers lightly on a napkin in his lap. He has a high nervous laugh when excited about something, and postures his head in a series of attentive or thoughtful attitudes.

He is, ultimately, a mild eccentric who gives you the impression that he knows you are studying his eccentricities. And he is a gentleman. He paid for our drinks.