Top 100 Truman Capote Quotes
#1. There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion.
Truman Capote
#2. June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.
Truman Capote
#3. However few people can successfully demonstrate a principle in common ethics when their deliberation is festered with emotionalism.
Truman Capote
#4. Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that's why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden.
Truman Capote
#5. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#6. Have you never heard what the wise man say : all of the future exists in the past.
Truman Capote
#7. Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical.
Truman Capote
#8. If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. So blow your nose.
Truman Capote
#9. And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.
Truman Capote
#10. It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat
Truman Capote
#11. Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Truman Capote
#12. Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.
Truman Capote
#13. Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.
Truman Capote
#14. If concealment is the single weapon, then a villain is never a villain; one smiles to the very end.
Truman Capote
#15. Chrysanthemums," my friend commented as we moved through our garden stalking flower-show blossoms with decapitating shears, "are like lions. Kingly characters. I always expect them to spring. To turn on me with a growl and a roar.
Truman Capote
#16. Nothing is more usual than to feel that others have shared in our failures, just as it is an ordinary reaction to forget those who have shared in our achievements.
Truman Capote
#17. Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
Truman Capote
#18. You want not to give a damn, to exist without responsibility, without faith or friends or warmth.
Truman Capote
#19. You don't understand. You've never hated anybody.
No, I never have. We're allotted just so much time on earth, and I wouldn't want the Lord to see me wasting mine in any such manner.
Truman Capote
#20. We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why.
Truman Capote
#22. I don't use a typewriter, I write longhand, with a pencil. Essentially I'm a horizontal writer. I think better when I'm lying down.
Truman Capote
#23. Of many magics, one is watching a beloved sleep: free of eyes and awareness, you for a sweet moment hold the heart of him; helpless, he is then all, and however irrationally, you have trusted him to be, man-pure, child-tender.
Truman Capote
#24. You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.
Truman Capote
#25. Snow-quiet, sleep-silent, only the fun-fire faraway songsinging of children; and the room was blue with cold, colder than the cold of fairytales: lie down my heart among the igloo flowers of snow.
Truman Capote
#26. Quite deliberately my friend drops a kettle on the floor. I tap-dance in front of closed doors. One by one the household emerges, looking as though they'd like to kill us both; but it's Christmas, so they can't.
Truman Capote
#27. The blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.
Truman Capote
#29. Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.
Truman Capote
#30. All human life has its seasons and cycles, and no one's personal chaos can be permanent. Winter, after all, gives way to spring and summer, though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, and that summer, but they do, and always.
Truman Capote
#31. I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.
Truman Capote
#32. 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.
Truman Capote
#34. Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.
Truman Capote
#35. Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.
Truman Capote
#36. Clyde's mother was an ample, olive-dark woman with the worn and disappointed look of someone who had spent her life doing things for others: occasionally the mulling plaintiveness of her voice suggested that she regretted this.
Truman Capote
#37. Now listen to me, Buddy: there is only one unpardonable sin - deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never.
Truman Capote
#38. I've been working, working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your work and you see that it just isn't any good.
Truman Capote
#39. The mood of misery that descended never altogether lifted; it lingered like a cloud that might rain or might not.
Truman Capote
#40. I should say a student does well to remain one as long as he can. It seems to me very doubtful that formal education could ever harm a potential artist - of course, it won't make him one either.
Truman Capote
#41. I always write the end of everything first. I always write the last chapters of my books before I write the beginning ... Then I go back to the beginning. I mean, it's always nice to know where you're going is my theory.
Truman Capote
#42. In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly, yes, hear the
breaking of new blooms.
Truman Capote
#44. New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.
Truman Capote
#45. She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.
Truman Capote
#46. Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)
Truman Capote
#47. A crazy elation caught hold of Joel, he ran, he zigzagged, he sang, he was in love, he caught a little tree-toad because he loved it and because he loved it he set it free, watched it bounce, bound like the immense leaping of his heart;
Truman Capote
#48. The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.
Truman Capote
#50. Be consistent in your attitude towards her and do not add anything to the impression she has that you are weak, not because you need her good-will but because you can expect more letters like this, and they can only serve to increase your already dangerous anti-social instincts.
Truman Capote
#51. Small towns are best for spending Christmas, I think. They catch the mood quicker and change and come alive under its spell.
Truman Capote
#52. It is well known that women outlive men; could it merely be superior vanity that keeps them going?
Truman Capote
#53. Sister who lived with men without marrying them. All
Truman Capote
#54. Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.
Truman Capote
#55. Bonnie Jean said, "You don't understand. Daddy's taking us away. To Nebraska." Bess Hartman looked at the mother,
Truman Capote
#56. Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.
Truman Capote
#57. It was smaller than the Kidwells', and, moreover, he shared it with a wife, three active children, and a perpetually functioning television set. ("It's the only way we can keep the kids pacified.
Truman Capote
#58. It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy.
Truman Capote
#59. Priests and nuns have had their chance with me. I'm still wearing the scars to prove it.) And so, during the weekend recess, the Meiers invited Cullivan to eat Sunday dinner with the prisoner in his cell. The opportunity to entertain his friend, play host
Truman Capote
#60. And suppose you don't like it? Excellent question; and, strangely, one I'd never asked myself, principally because I had chosen the ingredients, and I always have faith in my own judgment.
Truman Capote
#61. One day she told the class, 'Nancy Clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that's one definition of a lady.'
Truman Capote
#64. In school we only learn to recognize the words and to spell but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only life and living can give us.
Truman Capote
#65. At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.
Truman Capote
#67. Day - the moon was so bright - and cold and kind of windy; a lot of tumbleweed blowing about. But that's all I saw. Only now when I think back, I think somebody must have been hiding there. Maybe down among the trees. Somebody just waiting for me to leave.
Truman Capote
#68. I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.
Truman Capote
#69. Good. But why written in three styles of script?" To which Nancy had replied: "Because I'm not grown-up enough to be one person with one kind of signature.
Truman Capote
#70. Holly had married him: well, well. I wished I were under the wheels of the train.
Truman Capote
#71. Capote's rejoinder to Kerouac's assertion that he never needed to edit his work ... But, that's not writing . That's typing.
Truman Capote
#72. Well, it wasn't no revelation to me cause I always knew she was a freak.
Truman Capote
#73. I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.
Truman Capote
#74. It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.
Truman Capote
#76. Ida, dear, please, do I complain? It is right a child should not love the mama the way the mama loves the child; children are ashamed of the love a mama has for them: that is part of it. But when a boy grows into a man it is right his time should be for other ladies.
Truman Capote
#77. No one I remember still lives there except Madame Sapphia Spanella, a husky coloratura who every afternoon went roller-skating in Central Park.
Truman Capote
#78. Nancy clutter is always in a hurry, but she always has time. And that is the definition of a lady.
Truman Capote
#79. The only rich women who ever interested me, the ones who were ever my friends, were adventuresses---people who were total self-creations.
Truman Capote
#81. is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat. But how would she feel if she were compelled to hustle her living on the streets?
Truman Capote
#82. Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.
Truman Capote
#83. though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom.
Truman Capote
#85. I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.
Truman Capote
#86. My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.
Truman Capote
#87. Little things really belong to you," she said, folding the fan. "They don't have to be left behind. You can carry them in a shoebox.
Truman Capote
#88. Excitement - a variety of creative coma - overcame me.
Truman Capote
#89. There's so few things men can talk about. If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he doesn't like girls.
Truman Capote
#91. impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises - on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive
Truman Capote
#92. Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.
Truman Capote
#93. In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore - there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate.
Truman Capote
#94. The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. "Darling," she instructed me, "would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick.
Truman Capote
#95. I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.
Truman Capote
#96. She spent the rest of the way home despising New York: anonymity, in virtuous terror; and the squeaking drainpipe, all-night light, ceaseless footfall, subway corridor, numbered door (3C).
('Master Misery')
Truman Capote
#97. I believe in hanging. Just so long as I'm not the one being hanged.
Truman Capote
#98. The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean ... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.
Truman Capote
#99. There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things ... mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.
Truman Capote
#100. We don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I.
Truman Capote
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top