Truman Capote Quotes

I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.
Truman Capote
It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell -- a grain of sand that I didn't know was there and didn't particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can't help becoming obsessed with the pearl.
Truman Capote
That's not writing that's typing.
Truman Capote
I've always seen myself as a winner even as a kid. If I hadn't I just might have gone down the drain a couple of times. I've got something inside of me peasantlike and stubborn and I'm in it 'til the end of the race.
Truman Capote
In California everyone goes to a therapist is a therapist or is a therapist going to a therapist.
Truman Capote
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
Truman Capote
In California everyone goes to a therapist is a therapist or is a therapist going to a therapist.
Truman Capote
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.
Truman Capote
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.
Truman Capote
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
Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.
Truman Capote
New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.
Truman Capote
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.
Truman Capote
Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a friend, "I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough...")
Truman Capote
It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course.
Truman Capote
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
And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.
Truman Capote
She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so.
Truman Capote
What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude
Truman Capote
What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.
Truman Capote
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
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
But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.
Truman Capote
...he called after her as shedisappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry...
Truman Capote
Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
Truman Capote
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
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
Duntz asked Smith, 'Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?' 'Between forty and fifty dollars.
Truman Capote
Those fellows, they're always crying over killers. Never a thought for the victims.
Truman Capote
Because it's indeed difficult to portray, in any meaningful depth, another being, his appearance, speech, mentality, without to some degree, and often for quite trifling cause, offending him. The truth seems to be the nobody likes to see himself described as he is, or cares to see exactly set down what he said and did. Well, even i can understand that - because i don't like it myself when I am the sitter not the portraitist: the frailty of egos- and the more accurate the strokes, the greater the resentment.
Truman Capote
Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.
Truman Capote
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.
Truman Capote
Sorrow and profound fatigue are at the heart of Dewey's silence. It had been his ambition to learn "exactly what happened in that house that night." Twice now he'd been told, and the two versions were very much alike, the only serious discrepancy being that Hickock attributed all four deaths to Smith, while Smith contended that Hickock had killed the two women. But the confessions, though they answered questions of how and why, failed to satisfy his sense of meaningful design. The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered. And Dewey could not forget their sufferings. Nonetheless, he found it possible to look at the man beside him without anger - with, rather, a measure of sympathy - for Perry Smith's life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another. Dewey's sympathy, however, was not deep enough to accommodate either forgiveness or mercy. He hoped to see Perry and his partner hanged - hanged back to back.
Truman Capote
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.
Truman Capote
You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.
Truman Capote
A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode.
Truman Capote
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
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
The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird.
Truman Capote
The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.
Truman Capote
Are the dead as lonesome as the living?
Truman Capote
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.
Truman Capote
Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.
Truman Capote
Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they'd done a good job.
Truman Capote
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
If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?
Truman Capote
Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.
Truman Capote
All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace.
Truman Capote
Somewhere in this world there exists an exceptional philosopher named Florie Rotondo.The other day I came across one of her ruminations printed in a magazine devoted to the writings of schoolchildren. It said: “If I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet, Earth, and seek uranium, rubies, and gold. I'd look for Unspoiled Monsters. Then I'd move to the country. --Florie Rotondo, age 8.”Florie, honey, I know just what you mean – even if you don’t: how could you, age eight?
Truman Capote
But if you live your life without feeling and compassion for your fellowman—you are as an animal—'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' & happiness & peace of mind is not attained by living thus.
Truman Capote
I think the argument that no whites are free of racism is quite erroneous. But then, on another level, does it really matter if anybody is free of any negative feeling about anything? No matter how much you love somebody, you know, there's some part of him you don't like.
Truman Capote
A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
Watching her, I remembered a girl I'd known in school, a grind, Mildred Grossman. Mildred: with her moist hair and greasy spectacles, her strained fingers that dissected frogs and carried coffee to picket lines, her flat eyes that only turned toward the stars to estimate their chemical tonnage. Earth and air could not be more opposite than Mildred and Holly, yet in my head they acquired a Siamese twinship, and the thread of thought that had sewn them together ran like this: 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. 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. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still gluttonous for everything on it. It would never be different. They would walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left.
Truman Capote
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.
Truman Capote
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
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
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
So if black power means black armies racing through the streets, creating havoc, that certainly does nothing to advance the legitimate political and economic aspirations of the black community. Just the opposite, in fact....If they think a few Molotov cocktails are going to bring down the whole system and build something new, I'm afraid they're just indulging in wishful-thinking,
Truman Capote
The trouble with all these far-right and far-left mentalities is that they can encompass only one side of an argument and are congenitally incapable of holding two opinions in their heads at the same time.
Truman Capote
Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky.
Truman Capote