Truman Capote Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won't. Or will-depending. 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.

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.

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,

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.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.

The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. His works means nothing, otherwise. It has no meaning.

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.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour.

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.

Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.

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

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.

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...")

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.

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.

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.

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.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

...he called after her as shedisappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry...

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.

Duntz asked Smith, 'Added up, how much money did you get from the Cutters?' 'Between forty and fifty dollars.

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.

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.

What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude

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

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.

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.

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.

If we know the past, and live the present, it is possible that we dream the future?

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.

When he was in the army he'd picked up a great many girls: sometimes nothing happened except a lot of talk, and that was all right too: because it didn't matter what you said to them, for in those transient moments lies or truth were arbitrary and you were whatever you wanted to be.

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.

Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.

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.

I know it's become fashionable to depict the police as sadistic Cossacks riding down innocent citizens, but I've become well enough acquainted with law-enforcement agencies across the country to know that's just not the case. Of course, a certain small percentage of policemen are irresponsible...but that doesn't justify the current unjust barrage of propaganda against a tribe of men who are hard-working, underpaid and daily risking their lives to protect us. I'm sure there are isolated instances of police brutality, but the rising crime rate and urban violence constitute a far, far more pressing problem.

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.

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

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.

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.

Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.""She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me. "Moderately," Holly confessed....Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.

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.

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.

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.

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.

He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone....

All children are morbid: it's their one saving grace.

But I'm not a saint yet. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who's a friend.

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.

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

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

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.

What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.

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