Top 100 Capote Truman Quotes
#1. Hack, hack, hack. I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to spit on a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. And I think she's a horrible person, too. I know her ... So arrogant, so sure of herself. I'm sure she's carrying a dildo in her purse.
Truman Capote
#2. If concealment is the single weapon, then a villain is never a villain; one smiles to the very end.
Truman Capote
#3. I remember things the way they should have been.
Truman Capote
#5. Grady felt a chill echo, the kind that comes when, in an original situation, one has the sensation of its all having occurred before: if we know the past, and live the present, is it possible that we dream the future?
Truman Capote
#6. It may be that there is no place for any of us. Except we know there is somewhere; and if we found it, but lived there only a moment, we could count ourselves blessed.
Truman Capote
#7. Actually, I think friendship and love are exactly the same thing.
Truman Capote
#9. 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 don't like girls.
Truman Capote
#10. Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy,
Truman Capote
#11. If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I've come to appreciate a long day.
Truman Capote
#12. Yes: but aren't love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is
if it's just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing.
Truman Capote
#13. If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?
Truman Capote
#14. I felt infuriatingly left out
a tugboat in drydock while she, glittery voyager of secure destination, steamed down the harbor with whistles whistling and confetti in the air.
Truman Capote
#15. Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.
Truman Capote
#17. But that's impossible. Can you imagine Mr. Clutter missing church? Just to sleep?
Truman Capote
#18. As a child he had often thought of killing himself, but those were sentimental reveries born a wish to punish his father and mother and other enemies.
Truman Capote
#19. He had no thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and the furniture has rotten away.
Truman Capote
#20. You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.
Truman Capote
#21. Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.
Truman Capote
#23. Customers to whom he'd sold three dollars and six cents' worth of gas the night of the Holcomb tragedy.
Truman Capote
#25. Where are you, Fred? Because it's cold. There's snow in the wind.
Truman Capote
#26. Here is a hall without exit, a tunnel without end.
Truman Capote
#27. I have an extremely strong, masculine mind and a feminine sensibility level, which is kind of an unusual combination. Both men and women tell me things and I can relate on two levels simultaneously.
Truman Capote
#28. They've had the old clap-yo'-hands so many times it amounts to applause.
Truman Capote
#29. Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
Truman Capote
#30. You're wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you're right. She isn't a phony because she's a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can't talk her out of it.
Truman Capote
#31. Dreams are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us.
Truman Capote
#32. 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
#33. All his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.
Truman Capote
#34. I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does they might as well be dead.
Truman Capote
#35. He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone ...
Truman Capote
#36. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing"? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending.
Lynne Truss
#37. Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
Truman Capote
#39. You are a human being with a free will. Which puts you above the animal level. But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman - you are as an animal - "an
Truman Capote
#40. amazement, shading into dismay; a shallow horror sensation that cold springs of personal fear swiftly deepened.
Truman Capote
#41. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
Truman Capote
#42. Let's don't say another word. let's just go to sleep ...
Truman Capote
#45. What is today?"
"Thursday."
"Thursday." She stood up. "My God," she said, and sat down again with a moan. "It's too gruesome.
Truman Capote
#46. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick. -Holly Golightly
Truman Capote
#47. I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.
Truman Capote
#48. Deep down," Perry continued, "way, way
rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.
Truman Capote
#49. Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.
Truman Capote
#50. 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
#51. However few people can successfully demonstrate a principle in common ethics when their deliberation is festered with emotionalism.
Truman Capote
#52. Never pump the well dry; always leave a bucket there.
Truman Capote
#53. That's not bad. I can't get excited by a man until he's forty-two.
Truman Capote
#54. Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.
Truman Capote
#55. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#56. And that Perry could not abide: anyone's ridiculing the parrot,
Truman Capote
#57. It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
Truman Capote
#58. I understood Truman Capote's brilliant assessment of the writer's dilemma: When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.
Betsy Lerner
#60. 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
#61. The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.
Truman Capote
#62. I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
Truman Capote
#63. I've been other things beside a clown. I have sold insurance, too.
Truman Capote
#64. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
#65. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#66. Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.
Truman Capote
#67. It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
Truman Capote
#68. June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.
Truman Capote
#69. I can't get excited about a man until he's forty-two. I know this idiot girl who keeps telling me I ought to go to a head-shrinker; she says I have a father complex. Which is so merde. I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did.
Truman Capote
#70. The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.
Truman Capote
#71. I haven't anything against whores, except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts.
Truman Capote
#72. Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.
Truman Capote
#73. Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.
Joshua Foer
#74. There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion.
Truman Capote
#76. It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat
Truman Capote
#77. Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.
Truman Capote
#78. He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.
George Plimpton
#79. 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
#81. I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable.
Truman Capote
#82. 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 that is.
Truman Capote
#83. Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Truman Capote
#84. But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.
Truman Capote
#85. Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.
Truman Capote
#86. Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.
Truman Capote
#87. On the opposite bank, a hummingbird, whirring it's invisible wings, ate the heart of a giant tiger lily.
Truman Capote
#88. The stars were his pleasure, but tonight they did not comfort him; they did not make him remember that what happens to us on earth is lost in the endless shine of eternity. Gazing at them-the stars-he thought of the jewelled guitar and its worldly glitter.
Truman Capote
#89. I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.
Truman Capote
#90. And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.
Truman Capote
#91. 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
#92. First, a gorgeous breakfast: just everything you can imagine from flapjacks and fried squirrel to hominy grits and honey in the comb ... we're so impatient to get at the presents we can't eat a mouthful.
Truman Capote
#93. The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.
Truman Capote
#94. Randolph," he said, "do you know something? I'm very happy." To which his friend made no reply. The reason for this happiness seemed to be simply that he did not feel unhappy; rather, he knew all through him a kind of balance. There was little for him to cope with.
Truman Capote
#95. 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
#96. I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all....They want a certain kind of identity; they're jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety.
Truman Capote
#97. Scrubbed, combed, as tidy as two dudes setting off on a double date, they went out to the car.
Truman Capote
#98. Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it, French hoard it, Italians squander it, Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Know what I say? I say time is a crook.
Truman Capote
#99. I'll own up: I think it is a dream, Miss Verena. But a man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.
Truman Capote
#100. Have you never heard what the wise man say : all of the future exists in the past.
Truman Capote
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