Truman Capote Quotes

Truman Capote delivers sharp, witty observations that mix humor with social commentary, perfect for anyone who enjoys clever, edgy remarks.

45 quotes

1. Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix.

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

3. But my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incomplete episodes

4. 'In California, you lose a point off your IQ every year.'

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

6. 'As everyone knows, a fag is a homosexual gentleman who has just left the room.'

7. 'Good taste is the death of art.'

8. About Jack Kerouac: 'That's not writing; That's typing.'

9. 'More tears are shed for answered prayers than for unanswered ones.' (The dedication in his last, unfinished work)

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

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

12. 'Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.'

13. 'I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that is why I started to write. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.'

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

15. 'All literature is gossip.'

16. 'Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.'

17. '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.'

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

19. 'It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils at the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze.'

20. 'People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.'

21. 'Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad'

22. At Jesus Fever's funeral;

23. 'The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.'

24. Miss Amy:'Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure.'

25. 'She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.'

26. [L]ove, having no geography, knows no boundaries.

27. Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.

28. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait.

29. You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

30. 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.

31. One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

32. I've never worked for a newspaper. I've had some very bad reviews in newspapers.

33. Just remember: 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.

34. Whatever relationship you have, man or woman, you have to be very attentive and you have to be a very good friend to them regardless of what they do.

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

36. Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.

37. It's odd about tattoos. I've talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide-multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominate- I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed.

38. If you happen to capture my imagination for some reason and I decide to write about you and you don't like what I wrote about you, which is entirely possible, then yes, I'm a dangerous writer.

39. You don't run out on people; you run out on yourself.

40. If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

41. I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.

42. I think I would have written five times as much as I've written if I didn't have this terrible sense of perfection.

43. I think most people are very, very much motivated by sex - greed, sex, and hunger.

44. I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve 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, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

45. I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.