Truman Capote Quotations

Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

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.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

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.

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.

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.

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

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.

I can see every monster as they come in.

I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas. , "Answered Prayers" (Unspoiled Monsters).

I am sorry that it has been found necessary to cut the story, however, this seems to me to have been done not unintelligently, for which I am grateful. Nevertheless, I have, here and there, restored a few of these elisions, and made equivalent cuts elsewhere.

Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there.

It isn't writing at all - it's typing

When I think of how good my book can be, it scares me.

the part that he has been waiting for. He's 38 years old. He's never led a movie successfully. When I say 'successfully,' I mean like to the point where it took root in the culture and became a fixture in the culture ... For all of the respect that he gets, it hasn't happened. And this is a role that required everything he absolutely had. This thing took a lot out of him.

The good thing about masturbation is that you don't have to dress up for it

Adorned with cape, with tricorn, saintly soul singing in librarian tones an enameled song that coolly celebrates her chewing-gum enthusiasms.

it's a well-known photograph. This was 1984, just three months before he died.

I never cared for his writings one whit. Boring ... boring.

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.

New York is the only real city-city.

In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly, yes, hear the breaking of new blooms.

The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.

I also write the last paragraph or page of a story first. That way I always know what I'm working towards.

Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.

I guess if you're that thin and that small you don't need to take up too much space or breathe that much air. You just keep on going.

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.

A man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat. He stores up a lot of poison.

Let's take everything just as it is.

Have you never heard what the wise man say : all of the future exists in the past.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

Anticipation is anxiety. I have always had a very extreme anxiety thing.

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.

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.

The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman, because he'll come sleep in your closet rather than spend 10 shillings on a hotel.

It's worth your life to order an omelette in most restaurants. You never know what you're going to get.

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

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.

New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.

A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.

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.

The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common.

Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany's, but almost.

It's redundant to die in Los Angeles.

The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would change. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They would never change because they'd been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic.

She had only one flaw. She was perfect, otherwise whe was perfect.

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.

The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.

It is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

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.

I live in Brooklyn. By choice,

All literature is gossip.

The average personality re-shapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul-desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change.

As Miss Golightly was saying, before she was so rudely interrupted...

How do I look so young? Quite simple: a complete vegetable diet, 12 hours sleep a night, and lots and lots of make-up.

Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.

I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.

our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.

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.

It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.

Talent is a valued tormentor.

I remember things the way they should have been.

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 the art of solving a mystery.

Sicily is more beautiful than any woman.

Any work of art, provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.

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.

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.

Most people who become suddenly famous overnight will find that they lose practically eighty percent of their friends. Your old friends just can't stand it for some reason.

Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don't put them on paper.

There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they're not writers - they're typists.

Mick Jagger moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire.

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.

One day, I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation... I'm here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards - and, of course, the whip God gave me.

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.

Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everything, and don't understand nothing, just fullofem.

[C]locks indeed must have thier sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?

[Y]outh is hardly human: it can't be, for the young never believe they will die...especially would they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.

So the days, the last days, blow about in a memory, hazy autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived

Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department.

I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.

Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.