Top 100 Quotes About Truman Capote
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Are there any writers on the literary scene whom I consider truly great? Yes: Truman Capote.
Truman Capote
#4. 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
#5. [ 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
#6. Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously.
Gerald Clarke
#7. I started to work at the Colony in March 1958. I remember my first day because the telephone started to ring, and it was Sinatra, three for lunch, his usual table; Onassis, two for lunch, usual table; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Leland Hayward, Truman Capote, all wanting their usual tables.
Sirio Maccioni
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Truman Capote was a magical, beautiful writer.
Lisa Unger
#11. 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
#12. My dream dinner party guests would be Ethel Kennedy, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.
Dylan Penn
#13. To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult.
Truman Capote
Truman Capote
#14. Truman Capote is really an interesting cat.
Steve Earle
#15. I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.
Kiran Desai
#16. He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]
Deborah Kerr
#17. I would go to the all-night grocery store and pretend that I was at Studio 54 because it was the only place open all night. Truman Capote in the frozen foods. Andy Warhol over in vegetables.
James St. James
#18. My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man.
Alvin Ailey
#20. Jimmy Carter as President is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is just too big for him.
Rich Little
#21. A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
Mary McCarthy
#22. Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.
Gore Vidal
#23. I couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.
Truman Capote
#25. There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion.
Truman Capote
#26. Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.
Truman Capote
#27. I haven't anything against whores, except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts.
Truman Capote
#28. The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.
Truman Capote
#29. 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
#30. June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.
Truman Capote
#31. 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
#32. Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.
Truman Capote
#33. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#34. However few people can successfully demonstrate a principle in common ethics when their deliberation is festered with emotionalism.
Truman Capote
#35. I've been other things beside a clown. I have sold insurance, too.
Truman Capote
#36. 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
#37. The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.
Truman Capote
#38. 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
#40. It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.
Truman Capote
#41. And that Perry could not abide: anyone's ridiculing the parrot,
Truman Capote
#42. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.
Truman Capote
#43. Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.
Truman Capote
#44. That's not bad. I can't get excited by a man until he's forty-two.
Truman Capote
#45. Never pump the well dry; always leave a bucket there.
Truman Capote
#46. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
#47. Have you never heard what the wise man say : all of the future exists in the past.
Truman Capote
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Scrubbed, combed, as tidy as two dudes setting off on a double date, they went out to the car.
Truman Capote
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.
Truman Capote
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.
Truman Capote
#58. It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat
Truman Capote
#59. 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
#60. On the opposite bank, a hummingbird, whirring it's invisible wings, ate the heart of a giant tiger lily.
Truman Capote
#61. Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.
Truman Capote
#62. 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
#63. Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Truman Capote
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Where are you, Fred? Because it's cold. There's snow in the wind.
Truman Capote
#73. Customers to whom he'd sold three dollars and six cents' worth of gas the night of the Holcomb tragedy.
Truman Capote
#75. 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
#76. You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.
Truman Capote
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. But that's impossible. Can you imagine Mr. Clutter missing church? Just to sleep?
Truman Capote
#81. Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.
Truman Capote
#82. 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
#83. If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?
Truman Capote
#84. 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
#85. If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I've come to appreciate a long day.
Truman Capote
#86. Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy,
Truman Capote
#87. 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
#89. Actually, I think friendship and love are exactly the same thing.
Truman Capote
#90. 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
#91. 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
#93. I remember things the way they should have been.
Truman Capote
#94. If concealment is the single weapon, then a villain is never a villain; one smiles to the very end.
Truman Capote
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Deep down," Perry continued, "way, way
rock-bottom, I never thought I could do it. A thing like that.
Truman Capote
#99. I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.
Truman Capote
#100. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick. -Holly Golightly
Truman Capote
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