Truman Capote Quotes

She is pure Alice in Wonderland, and her appearance and demeanor are a nicely judged mix of the Red Queen and a Flamingo.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

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

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

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

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.

When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.

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

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

The brain may take advice, but not the heart.

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

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

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink.

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

Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master's wrist.

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.

If you weren't here, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be, doing anything you wanted to do, where would you be and what would you be doing?

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

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.

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.

Most people don't find their creativity. There are more unsung geniuses that don't even know they have great talent.

Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.

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

Are the dead as lonesome as the living?

Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.

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

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot". ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly

Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.

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.

New York is the only real city-city.

There is nobody in the world that you can't get if you really concentrate on it, if you really want them. You've got to want it to the exclusion of everything else.

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

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

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.

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

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

Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.

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.

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.

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.

A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird.

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

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

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

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

My yardstick is how somebody treats me.

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.