Top 100 Capote's Quotes
#1. Party of the Century by Deborah Davis, about Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball. Capote by Gerald Clarke. Truman Capote by George Plimpton. Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson. Slim, the memoir of Slim Keith. And The Sisters by David Grafton, about Babe Paley and her sisters.
Melanie Benjamin
#2. Capote's rejoinder to the Kerouac assertion that he never needed to edit his writing: "That's not writing .That's typing.
Joseph Cavano
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.
Truman Capote
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Bonnie Jean said, "You don't understand. Daddy's taking us away. To Nebraska." Bess Hartman looked at the mother,
Truman Capote
#13. There is really no practical help that one can offer; it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own convictions, or working with one's own work; your style is what seems natural to you. It is a long process of discovery, one that never ends. I am working at it, and will be as long as I live.
Truman Capote
#14. Don't wanna ride on the devil's side ... just wanna ride with you
Truman Capote
#15. Then, touching the brim of his cap, he headed for home and the day's work, unaware that it would be his last.
Truman Capote
#16. What I found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it;nothing very bad could happen to you there.
Truman Capote
#17. But I know what I like.' She smiled, and et the cat drop to the floor. 'It's like Tiffany's,'she said. 'Not that I give a hoot about jewellery. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty; and even that's risky.
Truman Capote
#18. How unnecessary," said Amy. "The child's morbid enough."
"All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace," said Randolph, and went right ahead.
Truman Capote
#19. Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.
Truman Capote
#20. I knew damn well I'd never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you're intelligent, it's too embarrassing.
Truman Capote
#21. 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
#22. No one lingered, neither the press corps nor any of the towns people. Warm rooms and warm suppers beckoned them, and as they hurried away, leaving the cold square to the two gray cats, the miraculous autumn departed too; the year's first snow began to fall.
Truman Capote
#23. Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure.
James Wolcott
#24. It's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.
Truman Capote
#25. I'm praying for you, Mary. I want you to live forever.
Truman Capote
#26. There's the one and only T.C. There was nobody like me before, and there ain't gonna be anybody like me after I'm gone ...
Truman Capote
#27. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote
#29. Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.
Truman Capote
#30. We don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I.
Truman Capote
#31. 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
#32. I heard about the project over a year before we began. My American agent said, 'Oh, you might want to read 'In Cold Blood' because they're talking about you for Capote, but the script's with Johnny Depp and Sean Penn at the moment.' So, these things take their time to dribble down the food chain.
Toby Jones
#33. Some of the most vivid writing in America is on the walls of restrooms. The men's room in the Albany, N.Y. railroad station, for instance, should be preserved as a national shrine: there is more wit there than in any Broadway hit!
Truman Capote
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. It's bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.
Truman Capote
#38. The mill owner's wife persist. 'A dollar, my foot! Fifty cents. That's my last offer. Goodness, woman, you can get another one.' In answer, my friend gently reflects: 'I doubt it. There's never two of anything.
Truman Capote
#39. Of course there is a Santa Claus. It's just that no single somebody could do all he has to do. So the Lord has spread the task among us all. That's why everybody is Santa Claus. I am. You are.
Truman Capote
#41. You can do films for the fun of it, or the thrill of it, but certain films you can't do unless there's something driving you, something you have a passion for that will pull you through.
Truman Capote
#42. What I do requires fantastic concentration ... but you can't be totally alone, or you lose all contact with reality, so even when I'm engrossed and secluded, Jack Dunphy can be there. He's my oldest and best friend, and best critic too.
Truman Capote
#43. No. Because I'm not a cold plate of m-m-macaroni. I'm a warm-hearted person. It's the basis of my character.
Truman Capote
#44. There's got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did.
Truman Capote
#45. My dream dinner party guests would be Ethel Kennedy, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.
Dylan Penn
#46. I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away.
Truman Capote
#47. Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.
Truman Capote
#48. I only object when any one particular group...gets a stranglehold on American criticism and squeezes out anybody who doesn't conform to its own standards....The ax falls, ecumenically, on the head of anybody...who doesn't share this group's parochial preoccupations.
Truman Capote
#49. She says, this is Holly, I say honey, you sound far away, she says I'm in
New York, I say what the hell are you doing in New York when it's Sunday and you got
the test tomorrow?
She says I'm in New York cause I've never been to New York.
Truman Capote
#50. A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
Truman Capote
#51. In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.
Brian Evenson
#52. It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.
Truman Capote
#53. On the opposite bank, a hummingbird, whirring it's invisible wings, ate the heart of a giant tiger lily.
Truman Capote
#54. Let's don't say another word. let's just go to sleep ...
Truman Capote
#55. 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
#56. I love 'Capote.' Huge fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman; if he's not my all-time favorite actor he's definitely in my top five. I just love him so much.
Chris Pratt
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.
Truman Capote
#60. But that's impossible. Can you imagine Mr. Clutter missing church? Just to sleep?
Truman Capote
#61. 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
#63. Where are you, Fred? Because it's cold. There's snow in the wind.
Truman Capote
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. That's not bad. I can't get excited by a man until he's forty-two.
Truman Capote
#67. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#68. And that Perry could not abide: anyone's ridiculing the parrot,
Truman Capote
#69. It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
Truman Capote
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.
Truman Capote
#74. There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion.
Truman Capote
#76. I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.
Truman Capote
#77. But it's Sunday, Mr. Bell. Clocks are slow on Sundays.
Truman Capote
#78. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Truman Capote
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like.
Truman Capote
#82. I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.
Truman Capote
#83. There's things that you don't want to do and they keep haunting you and following you. Bennett Miller directed this project [Capote], who is a friend of mine since I was 16, and Danny Futterman wrote it, and he's also been a friend of mine since I was 16.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#84. 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
#85. She's such a goddamn liar maybe she don't know herself anymore.
Truman Capote
#86. I massaged and trained in figure and facial exercises - although facial exercises are a lot of crap; the only effective one is cocksucking. No joke, there's nothing like it for firming the jawline.
Truman Capote
#87. Freedom may be the most important thing in life, but there's such a thing as too much freedom.
Truman Capote
#88. 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
#89. It's hard these days to have a conversation, at least it is for me, about [Truman]Capote without "Good Night, and Good Luck" coming up in the same conversation.
Tavis Smiley
#90. All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace.
Truman Capote
#91. You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.
Truman Capote
#92. Dick loves to steal. It's an emotional thing with him - a sickness. I'm a thief too, but only if I don't have the money to pay. Dick, if he was carrying a hundred dollars in his pocket, he'd steal a stick of chewing gum.
Truman Capote
#93. If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it ... for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.
Truman Capote
#95. [ New York ] is a place that worships incompetence particularly if it's combined with energy and paranoid self-confidence. Only in a city like New York could Truman Capote have made it, or John Simon.
Gore Vidal
#96. It's the uncertainty concerning themselves that makes our friends conspire to deny the differences.
Truman Capote
#97. [Mrs. Clare] is a gaunt, trouser-wearing, woolen-shirted, cowboy-booted, ginger-colored, gingery-tempered woman of unrevealed age ("That's for me to know, and you to guess") but promptly revealed opinions, most of which are announced in a voice of rooster-crow altitude and penetration.
Truman Capote
#98. They've had the old clap-yo'-hands so many times it amounts to applause.
Truman Capote
#99. 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
#100. Capote wrote every day. He said that's the only way, you have to sit down every day and do it.
Debbie Harry
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